Eating Disorder Therapist Perth

Energetics Institute’s Eating Disorders Counselling in Perth involves both education and treatment of the compulsions, impulses, anxieties and self-soothing habits that many adults seek when anxious, depressed, traumatised, or in stressed lifestyles.
Our therapy team will also help reshape your body image, self-esteem, and entrenched beliefs, thoughts, images or feelings that may be fueling your cravings.

What Are Eating Disorders

An eating disorder may involve eating behaviour where a person eats more or less food than what your body requires for good health.  Over time, the habit becomes stronger than your will to control it. This may arise from distorted thinking and influences such as the internet around body shape, beauty, health and weight.

Common eating disorders are:

• Anorexia Nervosa  

Anorexia nervosa is a distorted thinking or fear-based disorder centred on weight gain where the person severely reduces food intake.

• Bulimia 

bulimia nervosa is a self-control style disorder with extremes of binge or excessive eating followed by impulses to purge or expel the food.

• Binge Eating Disorder

Binge eating or impulses to binge is where eating may be fast and not enjoyable or social, when not even hungry, but without purging or compensatory behaviours.

• Orthorexia

an obsession disorder where the person has intense thinking and preoccupation around the pursuit of a healthy diet or “healthy weight”. The focus on diet may be the focus of an underlying anxiety.

Eating Disorder Symptoms

A eating disorder is characterised by certain symptoms which may include:

• Excess focus on diets, amount of food ingested, body weight and food control 
• Extreme eating habits – either full abstinence or expelling
• Fears of consequences if strict or extreme measures are not followed
• Rejection or unhappiness of own body or self
• Binge eating disorder and related issue
• Extreme beliefs, practices or following extremist food philosophies or exercise
• Unhealthy must-win or perfectionist nature
• Critical mindset around weight loss
• Approval seeking
• Excessive exercise routines

What Causes Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are part of a wider issue of self-rejection and low self-esteem where body image plays a part in the negation of yourself. You may feel discontent as you benchmark yourself to false and illusory ideals propagated by the media that lead you to compensate for your relationship to food, exercise and your body.

Causes may also include trauma, depression anxiety, and family or relationship dynamics. There may be underlying hormonal or neurochemical imbalances, heavy metal toxicity, or genetic issues. It’s noted that family members are normally the first to notice these kinds of changes in the affected loved one along with huge changes in food choices or meal choice selection.

How Can Psychotherapy And Counselling Help Your Eating Disorders

Our Eating Disorder Treatment plan in Perth involves identifying and tackling both the core issues that created the eating disorder and also the symptoms and practices that now exist as the expression of that eating disorder and negative body image. This dual approach undertaken by our health professionals assists in creating an early intervention and encouragement to bring the eating disorder under control, and then to permanently lower levels of activation, and stop altogether.

Using a blend of psychotherapy and counselling, we allow you to fully express any suppressed emotions such as anger, grief, shame, guilt or fear that are blocked and which may be avoided by distracting yourself through the negative food choice and the developing eating disorder. This is offered as part of our anorexia treatment and bulimia treatment in our Perth practice.

Our therapy also involves problem-solving skills, cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness and strong positive boundaries between yourself and food, people and influences such as social media that may be contributing to your eating disorder.