Eating Disorders Today

Bias Confession from an Eating Disorders Specialist

       My patients and readers live their own lives with their own agendas and values leading the way.

       However, I am not neutral. I want, with all my heart, for them to live long healthy lives.  I want them to be well, to have love, joy, satisfaction, confidence and a genuine liking for themselves as they proceed onward to a feisty, interesting and healthy old age.

       I especially do not want anyone to break her own heart.

       People who come to my psychotherapy practice or writings need a reason to make that entry. Primarily, they come because they have an eating disorder. They also come because a person with an eating disorder is in their intimate circle.  They also come because they know someone who benefited from my work and want the same benefits.

       Mostly, they come because they experience emotional pain and frustration in their lives and have a spark of hope that maybe another way to live exists.

       Ending an eating disorder is a step, a major step granted, but still a step toward creating and living a better life. 

       In my practice, my focus is on the whole person sitting in front of me. I see the energy poured into the eating disorder.  I get a glimpse of what might be possible for this person if that energy were directed toward living a more full life.  When we share that glimpse we become a team of two with the goal being to send life energy to life.  That means dismantling the eating disorder mechanism and removing the need for the protection given by the eating disorder.

       Our mutual goal becomes creating a psychological, emotional and spiritual normal that allows a person’s genuine life potential to unfold.

       My job, as I see it, requires me to state my bias and let the person know that her best choice is one that comes from her beliefs, not mine. She also needs to know that I will support her  living based on her values, not mine.

       A free and healthy person will face difficult choices in life.  If an eating disorder doesn’t exist, then an automatic and artificial guiding system doesn’t take over the decision making by default. 

       For example, someone doesn’t stay home and binge instead of meeting with friends.  Or someone doesn’t binge and throw up before meeting a potential employer and therefore meet that person in a partially numbed condition.

       If an eating disorder isn’t there then decisions about school applications, career choices, pregnancy (to conceive or terminate), relationship choices (positive or negative), commitments of any kind,  are based on personal agenda and personal values.  These must belong to the individual, not me.

       I do my best to make my bias clear so that the person is free of any sense of obligation to please me. More importantly, my stating my bias helps the individual sort out what she thinks she is supposed to choose based on the agenda and values of others, including the entire culture, as opposed to what she deeply values. 

       After all, in the end, she lives her life.  And a satisfying life is one that is based on living according to her own true agenda and values.

       Sometimes self sacrifice is based on deeply held and honored values known and appreciated by the individual alone.  I believe a person needs to be free to make such a choice.

       However, if an eating disorder is in the way, choices involving self sacrifice can be blurred or seen as required with no possibility of flexibility, change or even a vague sense of the option to say, “No.”

       If she is oblivious to her own values she can make a choice that will immediately or eventually break her own heart. 

       While an eating disorder fades the person is challenged more and more to listen and learn her own truth.  Whether her truth is mine is not the issue.  I stand for her listening and honoring her own unbuffered self, mind, spirit, body and heart.  When she can do that, she is on her way to
living her real life, and that is a joyous and satisfying way to live.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com

Things to Do During National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (or Anytime!)

􀂐       Sign the National Eating Disorders Association’s Declaration of Independence from a Weight-    Obsessed World to free yourself from the three D’s: Dieting, Drive for Thinness, and Body Dissatisfaction.
 
􀂐       Celebrate Fearless Friday - A Day Without Dieting - and feel how empowering a diet-free day of self-acceptance can be!

􀂐       Attend a workshop, presentation, lecture, or meeting in your community that will help you feel better about yourself. See the National Eating Disorders Association’s website, your local newspaper or campus calendar for events.

􀂐       Use your voice to effect change: join the National Eating Disorders Association’s national media advocacy campaign to write letters of protest and praise to media, corporations and advertisers who promote negative or positive messages concerning body size, weight, dieting and eating disorders. Sign up via the web at www.NationalEatingDisorders.org.

􀂐       Consciously choose to avoid making comments about other people or yourself on the basis of body size or shape.

􀂐       Compliment someone else for a skill, talent, or characteristic they have that you appreciate. Remind yourself that a person’s value is not determined by their shape or size.

􀂐       Enjoy your favorite meal without feelings of guilt or anxiety over calories and fat grams.

􀂐       Donate your jeans and other old clothes that no longer fit your body comfortably to charity. Someone else will appreciate them, and you won’t have to worry about the way they fit anymore.

􀂐       Start each morning by looking in the mirror and saying something nice about yourself out loud.

􀂐       Put away or throw away your bathroom scale.

􀂐       Look through magazines and newspapers, ripping out advertisements, photos and articles that promote negative feelings about weight, body image and food. Talk back to the TV when you see or hear an ad that makes you feel dissatisfied with your body.

􀂐       Read a book that lifts your self-esteem, promotes positive body image, encourages healthy living or helps you overcome stereotypes about social standards of beauty.

􀂐       If you know someone who is struggling with an eating disorder, take the time to reassure them of your friendship and support for their recovery process.

􀂐       Throw out all of the diet products in your house.

􀂐       Remind yourself and others that It’s What’s Inside That Counts!

􀂐       Become a member of the National Eating Disorders Association and join the effort to create a world where self-esteem is not weighed in pounds on a scale. Visit www.NationalEatingDisorders.org or call (206) 382-3587 for more information.

       Challenge yourself to pick at least one of these easy-to-do tasks during each day of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week!

© 2004 National Eating Disorders Association. Permission is granted to copy and reprint materials for
educational purposes only. National Eating Disorders Association must be cited and web address listed.
www.NationalEatingDisorders.org 􀂎 Information and Referral Helpline: 800.931.2237

       By all means, share with us on this blog your experience when you do any of these activities.

       For me, and all of us in the eating disorder recovery professional community, every day is eating disorder awareness day.  I've been a member and supporter of NEDA since its inception. I support the recovery of others. I don't diet. I wear clothes that fit, and I have no diet products in the house. 

       Whoops. Last night I co-hosted a wonderful dinner party in my home for the UCLA program, Dinner with 12 Strangers. Undergraduates, graduate students and alumni (that's my category) met in my home for a terrific evening.  Somebody brought tall bottles of soda including a diet soda.  A left over half bottle full is in my kitchen but on its way out.

       These diet products do slip in, don't they?

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com

 

Miss America, Anorexia, Fear: Hiding in Plain Sight?

       Carrie, on ED-Bites wrote an indignant response to what I consider a rather cavalier column about eating disorders in the New York Daily News.

       Carrie said her own anorexia was based not on controlling weight or the external world but on controlling fear.  I agree.  Controlling everything a person possibly can control in an attempt to control what is uncontrollable I feel is at the root of most eating disorders.

       When that point is acknowledged the discussion goes away from food, fashion, weight, appearance, and even beauty and sexuality. 

       The discussion then becomes centered around the questions, Why are growing numbers of women at increasingly younger ages afraid?  What are they afraid of?  Why do they feel that their fears are justified and that they have no way of protecting themselves except through eating disorders?

       Addressing those questions takes courage and honesty.  In my experience as a psychotherapist, the attempt at reaching answers to these questions is the beginning of genuine eating disorder recovery.

       Fitting into what our culture defines as beautiful, even if that definition encompasses an unhealthy and dangerous physical condition, may well be protection women seek from their fears. 

       The authors of the Daily News column, Dr. David Moore and Bill Manville, end their discussion on a victorious note.  They describe proof of Kirsten Haglund’s  victory over anorexia in terms of her becoming Miss America.  Good grief. The woman found a great hiding place.  She is the epitome of what our culture describes as beautiful. 

       I commend Miss Haglund for her industry, her hard work, her outspokenness in terms of eating disorder recovery. I wish her every success possible in living a long and healthy life. 

       I hope she and supportive loving people around her acknowledge that she is 19 years old, only four years away from her past experience of severe anorexia and that achieving a high cultural standard of beauty and acceptance – an anorexic’s dream – does not represent recovery. 

       I hope she is alert to her inner challenges and is prepared to cherish and honor her healthy emotional and psychological developmental needs as her term of Miss America fades and she continues.

       Thank you, Carrie, for bringing up this issue and for letting your honest sense of indignation come through to all of us.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com

Does Advertising Affect Eating Disorders?

A recent Hubpages blog raised the question: Does advertising affect eating disorders?

In my opinion, much of current advertising promotes both tiny size fashion in clothes and huge portion size in food. It's an impossible combination many people strive to integrate. 

A person vulnerable to eating disorders will strive to come up with a solution that allows her (or him!) to fit into tiny clothes and eat huge portions of food at the same time.  This person can become terribly ensnared by an eating disorder. 

But something worse exists.  Advertising that pushes people to be small and eat large supports eating disorder thinking and behavior.  The continual onslaught of emaciation, body surgery, and diet publicity actually convinces many people that the lifestyle being portrayed is normal. 

Such media portrayal validates starvation, cutting behaviors and binge and purge cycles.  Plus, this portrayal can delay recovery work.  If a person with an eating disorder is subjected to a barrage of images and messages celebrating the symptoms of her illness, she may believe she is living well and wisely and will not seek treatment. 

This is a cultural phenomenon that is tragic.  It contributes to people taking pride in their illness, proselytizing eating disorders, destroying their health, ruining relationships and, in far too many cases, shortening their lives.

What kind of influence does advertising and media portrayal of fashion, beauty and diet have on you? I welcome your thoughts and feelings.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com