Therapy for Eating Disorders
Breaking the Cycle of Disordered Eating
Struggling with food often begins with the desire to feel in control, lose weight, or meet unrealistic body ideals.
For many, strict dieting quickly spirals into a painful binge-restrict cycle—where intense restriction drives overwhelming urges to binge, followed by guilt, shame, and the drive to compensate through behaviors like compulsive exercising, purging, fasting, or using laxatives. For others, severe restriction leads to an ever-changing goal to lose more and more weight. The more weight lost, the greater the fear of gaining weight, which in turn fuels even more restriction.
Over time, these patterns take over your daily life, draining your energy, damaging your self-esteem, and leaving you feeling trapped.
Disordered eating is not a lack of willpower; it is a sign that you deserve support.
At Laird Counselling Services, we help you understand the root triggers behind these behaviors. Together, we will work to break the restriction loop, heal your relationship with food, and build sustainable, self-compassionate ways to cope with life’s challenges.
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Contact us today for a free consultation to explore how therapy can help you regain balance and peace of mind.
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About Disordered Eating
Eating Disorders often start with a desire to lose weight in an effort to improve body image and self-confidence. They can also arise from traumatic events that lead to coping with difficult feelings through food restriction or emotional eating. When disordered eating patterns emerge, they are confusing and upsetting. It is difficult to tell others about what is happening for many reasons, especially because you yourself might not understand why you are having these problems. Since it is hard to understand why the eating disorder cycle never goes away, it is assumed that others will not understand either. Keeping it a secret might feel safer than talking about it with a trusted friend, family member or doctor. Sometimes talking about it does not help because people are dismissive or offer unhelpful advice. However, dealing with an eating disorder alone can be painful and even dangerous.
Questions to consider regarding your relationship with food include:
- Do you feel out of control around food?
- Do you think of food as “good” and “bad” or have forbidden foods that you try to avoid?
- Do you experience shame or guilt if you eat forbidden foods?
- Do you try to compensate by restricting, purging or exercising?
- Do you try to limit your caloric intake or portion sizes?
- Do you feel afraid of gaining weight?
- Do you avoid social events, work or school if you don’t like your body?
- Do you feel anxious eating in front of others?
- Do you go for long periods of time without eating?
- If you restrict, do you eat a lot of food at once when you are alone or no one is around?
- Do you hide or hoard food?
- Do you prefer to eat in private?
These and other behaviours indicate disordered eating patterns. The term “disordered eating” covers a broad range of eating behaviours including dieting, food restriction, orthorexia (strict eating), emotional eating, binge eating, purging, night eating and others. If you deliberately avoid certain foods, have a fear of gaining weight or use food to cope with difficult feelings like boredom, stress, or disappointment, you may be dealing with disordered eating.
Disordered eating is divided into three broad categories:
- Anorexia (extreme food restriction causing weight loss and malnutrition);
- Bulimia (food restriction followed by binging and purging and sometimes exercise);
- Binge Eating (eating large amounts of food without purging).
These food patterns tend to be cyclical and self-reinforcing. It can feel frustrating to feel trapped in these eating patterns, only to discover that the negative self-image never seems to go away.
Luckily there are effective ways to restore your relationship with food and develop confidence in your ability to make adaptive, life-affirming choices for yourself.
Have a Question?
Reach out for a no-fee consultation and we can talk more about ways to overcome the dieting mentality and make peace with food and your body.
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