Increasing numbers of people have a problem with eating disorders and poor body image. Anorexia, bulimia and compulsive eating all bring their own distressing social and health problems, while a distorted body image can result in a severely restricted life. In this book, Christine Craggs-Hinton explains clearly the social pressures behind the need to be an ideal shape, and how we can fight back. She also examines why some people see themselves as overweight or ugly although they are normal, healthy, and the right body weight and size for their sex, age and build. Topics covered include: - the role of the media in creating unrealistic portraits of how we should look - the importance of self-esteem, and how to boost it - body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and its link with media influence - alcoholism: also a problem of low self-esteem - and its link with eating disorders - tackling negative thoughts - dealing with anxiety, and how to relax - practical exercises to get back to a healthy relationship with food Recovery from eating disorders and poor body image is possible, so start today!

""I wish to be the thinnest girl at school, or maybe even the thinnest eleven-year-old on the entire planet,"" confides Lori Gottlieb to her diary. "I mean, what are girls supposed to wish for, other than being thin?"
For a girl growing up in Beverly Hills in 1978, the motto "You can never be too rich or too thin" is writ large. Precocious Lori learns her lessons well, so when she's told that "real women don't eat dessert" and "no one could ever like a girl who has thunder thighs," she decides to become a paragon of dieting. Soon Lori has become the "stick figure" she's longed to resemble. But then what? "Stick Figure" takes the reader on a gripping journey, as Lori struggles to reclaim both her body and her spirit.
By turns painful and wry, Lori's efforts to reconcile the conflicting messages society sends women ring as true today as when she first recorded these impressions. "One diet book says that if you drink three full glasses of water one hour before every meal to fill yourself up, you'll lose a pound a day. Another book says that once you start losing weight, everyone will ask, 'How did you do it?' but you shouldn't tell them because it's 'your little secret.' Then right above that part it says, "'New York Times" bestseller.' Some secret."
With an edgy wit and keenly observant eye, "Stick Figure" delivers an engrossing glimpse into the mind of a girl in transition to adulthood. This raw, no-holds-barred account is a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of living up to society's expectations.

The first of its kind, this edited volume provides in-depth, culturally sensitive material intended for addressing the unique concerns of Black women with eating disorders in addition to comprehensive discussions and treatment guidelines for this population. The contributing authors-all of whom are Black professionals providing direct care to Black women-offer a range of perspectives to help readers understand the whole experience of their Black female clients. This includes not only discussion of their clients' physical health but also of their emotional lives and the ways in which the stresses of racism, discrimination, trauma, and adverse childhood experiences can contribute to disordered eating. Through a wealth of diverse voices and stories, chapters boldly tackle issues such as stereotypes and acculturative stress. Clinicians of any race will gain new tools for assessing, diagnosing, and treating disordered eating in Black women and will be empowered to provide better care for their clients.

Eating disorders present diagnostic and treatment challenges to clinicians. While such disorders need both medical and psychological treatment, patients may be too medically ill for a thorough psychiatric evaluation and may be misunderstood by many primary care physicians. In this revised and updated edition of "Eating Disorders," Philip S. Mehler and Arnold E. Andersen provide a user-friendly and comprehensive guide for primary care physicians, mental health professionals, and others who encounter individuals with the problem.

Mehler and Andersen identify common medical complications that people who have eating disorders face and answer questions about how to treat them. They also cover such serious complications as osteoporosis, cardiac arrhythmia, electrolyte abnormalities, immune compromise, and gastrointestinal sequelae. Incorporating case studies, medical background on the complications, suggestions for diagnosis and treatment, and a list of selected references, chapters cover important topics including team treatment and nutritional rehabilitation. The authors also address special areas of concern, such as athletes who have eating disorders and the pharmacologic treatment of obesity.

Mehler and Andersen encourage close medical follow-up for patients who have eating disorders. This book will help primary care and mental health professionals to understand and to more effectively address the complex concerns of patients with eating disorders.

A comprehensive guide on how to diagnose, treat, and care for those with eating disorders. Eating disorders, which include such conditions as anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and pica, represent a challenge to both patients and health care providers alike. For more than 20 years, health care providers have turned to the expert advice found in Eating Disorders to keep up to date with the latest research in the field and to help them provide the best care available for their patients. In this new, thoroughly revised and expanded edition of their best-selling work, Drs. Philip S. Mehler and Arnold E. Andersen provide a user-friendly and comprehensive guide to treating and managing eating disorders for primary care physicians, mental health professionals, worried family members and friends, and nonmedical professionals (such as teachers and coaches). Mehler and Andersen * identify common medical complications faced by people who have eating disorders * answer questions about how to treat both physical and behavioral aspects of eating disorders * discuss serious complications, including cardiac arrhythmia, electrolyte abnormalities, and gastrointestinal problems * incorporate all-new information on avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), binge eating disorder, and the role of social media in promoting disordered eating * offer targeted advice for working with specialists * include four new chapters on eating disorders in children and adolescents; atypical anorexia; eating disorders in transgender individuals; and family therapy * feature engaging clinical vignettes * answer a list of common questions practitioners may have in each chapter The most comprehensive work on the market and the only book that covers eating disorders in transgender individuals, Eating Disorders is a compassionate, evidence-based, and essential guide. Contributors: Arnold E. Andersen, Ovidio Bermudez, Jeana Cost, Meghan Foley, Dennis Gibson, Neville Golden, Sacha Gorell, Jeffrey Hollis, Mori J. Krantz, Daniel Le Grange, Russell Marx, Jennifer McBride, Philip S. Mehler, Leah Puckett, Katherine Sachs, Michael Spaulding-Barclay, Anna Tanner, Nathalia Trees, Jessica Tse, Kenneth Weiner, Patricia Westmoreland

Beyond a Shadow of a Diet is the most comprehensive book available for professionals working with clients who struggle with Binge Eating Disorder, Compulsive Eating or Emotional Overeating. The authors present research revealing that food restrictions in the pursuit of weight loss actually trigger and sustain overeating. Next, they offer step-by-step guidelines to help clients end the diet mentality and learn an internally-based approach known as attuned eating. Divided into three sections-The Problem, The Treatment and The Solution-this engaging book contains chapters filled with compelling case examples, visualizations and other exercises so that therapists can deepen their knowledge and skills as they help clients gain freedom from preoccupation with food and weight. In addition to addressing the symptoms, dynamics and treatment of eating problems, Beyond a Shadow of a Diet presents a holistic framework that goes well beyond the clinical setting. This invaluable resource includes topics such as the clinician's own attitudes toward dieting and weight; cultural, ethical and social justice issues; the neuroscience of mindfulness; weight stigma; and promoting wellness for children of all sizes. Drawing from the Health At Every Size paradigm-and the wealth of research examining the relationship between dieting, weight and health-Beyond a Shadow of a Diet offers both therapists and their clients a positive, evidence-based model to making peace with food, their bodies and themselves.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Eating Disorders in Young People is a state-of-the-art guide for parents based on enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT-E), one of the most effective treatments for eating disorders and recently adapted for adolescents. Part I presents the most current facts on eating disorders. Part II provides parents with guidance on how to support their child's recovery. The book will be of interest to parents of teenagers with eating disorders treated with CBT-E and also for clinicians using CBT-E with young patients.

* Takes a cultural development perspective, offering a unique approach which provides a clear, coherent framework for the book, and takes a balanced approach to quantitative and qualitative research * Features significant coverage of men and children as well as women, and contains useful indicators and lessons for how to promote positive body image, making this essential reading for students and academics across a range of disciplines, as well as professionals interested in body image * New edition includes the latest research and developments on topics including body image interventions, social media, incidence of dieting and cosmetic surgery, popular culture, and body scanning

* Employs the same interventions as standard FBT for anorexia and bulimia: externalization, agnosticism, parental empowerment, a behavioral focus on changing eating behavior * Early sessions focus on inciting parents to make changes and includes a family meal that allows therapists to observe and consult directly to mealtime behaviors * The first phase is focused on parents taking charge and changing the eating behaviors of their child that are maintaining ARFID. The second phase focuses on the child taking up in an age appropriate way managing their eating consistent with the changes the parents have employed in the first phase. For adolescents with ARFID, a third phase is a brief series of sessions focused on the impact of ARFID on adolescent developmental process

Provides psychoeducation regarding body image and its correlation with disordered eating Guides readers to practically work toward improving body image Gives space to underrepresented populations when it comes to body image and disordered eating habits

Free yourself from restrictive dieting, punishing exercise and food anxiety.

Laura Thomas PhD shows you how to actually break the diet cycle and free yourself from restrictive dieting and punishing exercise, one step at a time.

How to Just Eat It is a practical and interactive guide from bestselling author of Just Eat It and Registered Nutritionist Laura Thomas PhD. This book contains more than eighty activities – from journalling to self-care techniques – to help you reframe your approach to food and eating and find an escape from diets and restriction.

Beginning with simple exercises for changing your mindset, Thomas shows how to use easy everyday tools to break free from diet mentality, understand fullness cues, and nurture a neutral, judgement-free approach to food.

Thanks to expert step-by-step guidance and support through the principles of Intuitive Eating as well as other therapeutic practices, the book will prepare you with a range of personalised tools and skills that give structure to a new and better relationship with food and your body.

Multi-Family Therapy for Anorexia Nervosa is a treatment manual that details an empirically supported and innovative treatment for this disorder. This book provides a detailed description of the theory and clinical practice of MFT-AN. The treatment draws on the Maudsley Family Therapy for Anorexia Nervosa model as well as integrating other psychological and group frameworks. Part I details the theoretical concepts, MFT-AN structure, content and implementation, including clinically rich and detailed guidance on group facilitation, therapeutic technique and troubleshooting when the group process encounters difficulties. Part III provides step-by-step instructions for the group activities in the initial four-day intensive workshop and for the subsequent follow-up days that occur over a further six to eight months. The book will serve as a practical guide for both experienced and new clinicians working with children and adolescents with eating disorders and their families, in utilising multi-family therapy in their clinical practice.

* Chapters bring the voices of LGBTQ+ into the spotlight through art and contribute to experiential learning, allowing for more understanding of the lives of LGBTQ+ peoples within the dietetic profession * Includes arts-based research that has the capacity to acknowledges multiple truths within the world and to give voice and representation to LGBTQ+ individuals * Topic cover eating disorders, body image, creative practices in nutrition counseling, weight stigma, and gendered understandings of nutrition. Special attention is paid to experiences of marginalization, homophobia, heteronormativity within dietetics and nutritional healthcare, and the intersections of oppression, poverty, social justice, and politics

The book explores eating disorders through multiple lenses and addresses the significance of gender and culture. Addresses the role of the therapist in a treatment situation and the movement towards psychotherapy integration in treatment, and considers the role of gender and culture, including the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Written as an accessible introduction to the topic.

While many aspects of eating disorders remain a mystery, there is growing evidence that collaboration is an essential element for treatment success. This book emphasises and explains the importance of family involvement as part of a unified team approach towards treatment and recovery.

A Collaborative Approach to Eating Disorders draws on up-to-date evidence based research as well as case studies and clinical vignettes to illustrate the seriousness of eating disorders and the impact on both the sufferer and their loved ones. Areas of discussion include:

• current research including genetic factors, socio-cultural influences and early intervention
• clinical applications such as family based dialectical and cognitive behavioural treatments
• treatment developments for both adolescents and adults with a range of eating disorders
• building collaborative alliances at all levels for treatment and ongoing recovery.

With contributions from key international figures in the field, this book will be a valuable resource for students and mental health professionals including family doctors, clinicians, nurses, family therapists, dieticians and social workers.

Caring for a loved one with an eating disorder is a difficult task; carers often find it hard to cope, and this can contribute to the maintenance of the disorder. The Clinician's Guide to Collaborative Caring in Eating Disorders shows how active collaboration between professional and non-professional carers can maximise the quality of life for both the sufferer and all other family members.

The book provides straightforward guidance for clinicians who work with families and carers. It suggests ways of ensuring that interpersonal elements that can maintain eating disorders are minimised and indicates skills and knowledge that can be taught to the carer for both managing their personal reaction to the illness, and for providing a practically and emotionally supportive environment that is conducive to change. The appendices of the book contain a Toolkit for Carers, a series of worksheets designed to help carers recognise their own unique caring styles.

This book is worthwhile reading for all health professionals working with people with eating disorders. It is relevant across a variety of settings and client groups including inpatients, out-patients, community and day patients.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Eating Disorders in Young People is a state-of-the-art guide for parents based on enhanced cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT-E), one of the most effective treatments for eating disorders and recently adapted for adolescents. Part I presents the most current facts on eating disorders. Part II provides parents with guidance on how to support their child's recovery. The book will be of interest to parents of teenagers with eating disorders treated with CBT-E and also for clinicians using CBT-E with young patients.

This book provides readers with concrete, tangible tools for treating athletes with eating disorders by discussing issues that are unique to this population and introducing specific ideas to help facilitate recovery among this population. Dr. Bennett integrates her experiences in sport and mental health to provide a comprehensive resource for all healthcare providers who support athletes with eating disorders. Traditional sport psychology interventions are translated into clinical action to help therapists align with the athletic identities of individuals recovering from eating disorders. From diagnosis and neurobiology to athletic identity and excellence, this book covers a range of topics to help readers build their own toolboxes of creative and clinically sound psychological interventions. This comprehensive guide provides professionals who are new to the field with essential knowledge pertaining to the treatment of eating disorders and offers experienced healthcare providers insight on treatment aspects that are unique to working with athletes.

ARFID Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder: A Guide for Parents and Carers is an accessible summary of a relatively recent diagnostic term. People with ARFID may show little interest in eating, eat only a very limited range of foods or may be terrified something might happen to them if they eat, such as choking or being sick. Because it has been poorly recognised and poorly understood it can be difficult to access appropriate help and difficult to know how best to manage at home. This book covers common questions encountered by parents or carers whose child has been given a diagnosis of ARFID or who have concerns about their child. Written in simple, accessible language and illustrated with examples throughout, this book answers common questions using the most up-to-date clinical knowledge and research. Primarily written for parents and carers of young people, ARFID Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder includes a wealth of practical tips and suggested strategies to equip parents and carers with the means to take positive steps towards dealing with the problems ARFID presents. It will also be relevant for family members, partners or carers of older individuals, as well as professionals seeking a useful text, which captures the full range of ARFID presentations and sets out positive management advice.

This important book shows how psychotherapy can address severe eating disorders in children and young people, illustrating the ways an imprisoned self can be released from suffering. The book features a range of case studies while addressing core issues such as self-harm, hallucinations and the threat of suicide, as well as related topics such as depression and psychosis. Illustrating the psychological roots to eating disorders, it places therapy within hospital, clinical and multi-disciplinary contexts, as well as displaying how psychoanalytic theory can be applied across various settings and in different teams. Written by an eminent author in the field, this will be a key text for anyone wishing to understand eating disorders in children from a psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic dimension.

Using attachment theory as a lens for understanding the role of food in our everyday lives, this book explores relationships with other people, with ourselves and between client and therapist, through our connection with food. The aim of this book is twofold: to examine the nature of attachment through narratives of feeding, and to enrich psychotherapy practice by encouraging exploration of clients' food-related memories and associations. Bringing together contributions from an experienced group of psychotherapists, the chapters examine how our connections with food shape our patterns of attachment and defence, how this influences appetite, self-feeding (or self-starving) and how we may then feed others. They consider a spectrum from a "secure attachment" to food through to avoidant, preoccupied and disorganised, including discussion of eating disorders. Enriched throughout with diverse clinical case studies, this edited collection illuminates how relationships to food can be a rich source of insight and understanding for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and other counselling therapists working today.

Amid the welter of clinical studies, memoirs, and other death-defying tales of eating disorders, we remain unclear about the relationships among trauma, anorexia, and bulimia, and about the psychological pathways to recovery. Creating Bodies offers the gripping story of healing and transformation detailed in one woman's diaries. Hannah wrote 18 diaries between the ages of 14 and 32. In the excerpts reprinted herein, we watch Hannah navigate violent adolescent friendships, descend into anorexia and bulimia, marry an abusive man, struggle to recover memories of sexual abuse, and finally to heal. And we learn of her interaction with Katie Gentile, who analyzed her diaries and met with Hannah to discuss the latter's own understanding of the diaries and of the diary analysis.
Through a close study of both the content and structure of Hannah's diaries, Gentile shows how unspeakable, embodied remnants of sexual trauma become symbolized and how, within this process, Hannah's bulimia functioned as both an act of self destruction and a lifesaving form of resistance. Anchored in relational psychoanalysis and critical feminist theory, Creating Bodies provides a uniquely longitudinal account of the development of, and ultimate recovery from, an eating disorder fueled by childhood sexual abuse. An invaluable contribution to the literature on adolescent and adult eating disorders, it is also a thoughtful meditation on how the act of writing deepens issues of relationality and, over time, promotes cure. Psychoanalysts will be intrigued by the rich process issues embedded in prose journals, notes, and letters - both close to and distinct from clinical process issues - that Gentile uses to understandHannah's projects of self-destruction and reconstruction.

* The Recovery Cycle is the positive mirror image of the Addiction Cycle, and the first and only simple and relatable model for positive change in recovery * Written with both therapists and clients in mind - by a clinician in recovery herself - the easy, pragmatic, and conversational style plays to the resistance known to addicted people while gently encouraging sober relationships and spiritual connection * It speaks to all addiction disorders and discusses what every addicted person must go through to fall in love with their sober life, no matter what program they choose, no matter what addiction

Why do so many people become overweight and obese and why do they find it so difficult to lose weight? In this second edition of his influential book on Dieting, Overweight and Obesity, Wolfgang Stroebe - who developed the goal conflict model of eating - explores the physiological, environmental and psychological influence on weight gain and examines how these processes are affected by genetic factors. Like the first edition, the book takes a social-cognitive approach to weight regulation and discusses how exposure to environmental cues can set-off overeating in chronic dieters. In addition to extensively revising and updating the chapters of the first edition, this second edition features three new chapters. The chapter on successful restrained eating reviews personality factors as well as recent experimental research on impulse control. The chapters on psychological treatment of obesity and on primary prevention describe and evaluate the various treatment and prevention approaches and the research conducted to assess their efficacy. This book is essential reading for students, researchers and clinicians interested in an up-to-date review of the field of eating research and a new theoretical approach to the study of overweight and obesity.

Every psychotherapist will be familiar with what it means to experience the hatred and despair of their most vulnerable patients in the midst of a psychotherapy session. Most often these patients will manage to express their feelings verbally, but what about those who never developed the capacity to speak? Or those who are capable of talking, but carry a complex range of unprocessed embodied feelings that cannot be verbally expressed? Some patients must rely on another type of language in order to communicate their dissociative states of mind. Primitive Bodily Communications explores how the 'talking cure' can still work when words fail and the body 'talks.' Non-verbal communication can be thought of as a form of body language and, even though this is a topic not frequently discussed, many practitioners have experienced working with people who communicate through the use of their bodies. The book does not refer to bodily communications as primitive because we see them as inferior to verbal language, but simply because they point to the beginnings of psychological development, to primary ways of being and relating, as well as to enduring aspects of ourselves. The contributors explore the topic of primitive bodily communications in the context of intellectual disability, eating disorders and bodily neglect, focusing on the communicative aspect of bodily expressions within the therapeutic relationship. A wide spectrum of clinical cases illustrates how these patients can reach a state of better physical and emotional containment and, when possible, of verbal communication.