Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy

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Eating disorders, body image, and our relationship with food 

You don't have to have a "disorder" to feel badly about your body. Because of images in the media, messages in movies, and conflicting opinions from our families and friends, we can often feel badly about how our body looks.

Flipping open a magazine can reveal an impossibly flawless model, signaling to our brains that beauty means an impossible ideal: perfection. Even if we may know that airbrushing and photo editing created that image in the first place.

There are proven treatments for changing how we feel about our bodies - whether we have a specific focus on one area of our bodies that we can't stop thinking about, or if we are experiencing symptoms like starving ourselves, overly-controlled eating, meal skipping, binge eating, purging, too much exercise, or significant changes in mood that result from our food habits.

You're not alone. Our eating habits and compulsions often change during stressful times in our lives. Old habits become activated, new ones get created. They can persist from messages in our family of origin, our cultures of origin, or when we try to adjust to American culture from another set of traditions and beliefs.

Regardless of the cause, our clinicians are trained to help reclaim your body and your mind from thoughts that make you feel badly about what you eat and how you look. Treatments from a cognitive behavioral approach will help with making small changes in your habits that will empower change in how you think and feel.
Signs of Anorexia Nervosa and/or Bulimia Nervosa:

  • Refusing to maintain a body weight that is typical for age and height (or attaining weight loss that drops below 85% of what is expected in that age/developmental period)

  • Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat 

  • Denial that being underweight is a problem or saying something like "it's not serious that I'm this size"

  • Upon self-evaluation, person feels a distorted sense of body's size or attributes

  • Amenorrhea or consecutively missed menstrual periods

  • Control of one's eating habits through fasting, diuretics (diet pills), or starvation 

  • Periods of binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting 

  • Periods of binge eating followed by guilty feelings and/or a restricted diet
There's help. For a free phone consultation or to set up an appointment with us, call (415) 881-7324 or
                                                            email us at info@sfiap.com