What is Binge Eating Disorder?
Emotional eating, compulsive over-eating, and binge eating disorder are different ways of saying your eating patterns have become dysregulated. You may alternate between periods restrictive eating (“dieting”) and periods of loss of control over your eating (binge eating). Food serves some alternative function, beyond nourishment and basic enjoyment. It may be a comfort, a tool for control, a source of escape, a way to punish yourself. Thoughts about food may take over – how to control your eating, how to hide your eating, how to lose weight, how to avoid hunger.
Clients may or may not have experienced weight changes. You may have tried diet after diet. Weight may come off initially, but you struggle to maintain the diets long term or to keep the weight off after the diet has ended. You may have given up and feel like you inhabit a body that is no longer yours. Diets don’t work because they don’t address the underlying issues – your relationships with food, your body, and your emotions.
Help for Emotional Eating
Birch Tree Psychotherapy offers binge eating disorder treatment. We provide individual, group, and family therapy for adults and teens, in the Chicago and Northwest Suburban area, who struggle with emotional eating and binge eating disorder. In binge eating treatment, we start by getting off the diet roller coaster. We will work behaviorally to get your nutrition on track, with concrete, obtainable goals. We partner with community dietitians to help you understand your individual nutrition needs. Together, we will examine and change thought and behavior patterns related to food, your body, your emotions, and your life that maintain the problem. We will help you entangle yourself from diet culture and get in tune with what your body needs and wants. We will work on developing a more adaptive way of managing emotions and situations so that food becomes food again. We will work on your relationship with your body, developing intuitive eating skills, so that you can learn to trust your body again. The final result is that you feel more at peace with yourself and your body, finally able to use food as an enjoyable tool for nourishment rather than a source of suffering and shame.