Eating Disorder
There aren’t many positive words to say about eating disorders. If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know the truth: An eating disorder isn’t a thing to be trifled with, or brushed aside; an eating disorder can ruin your life, if you don’t take active steps to set yourself on the road to healing. Of course, that healing can’t come through willpower alone, and so it is that professional eating disorder treatment is the single most important point of focus for any eating disorder victim. The bottom line: If you’re going to get better, you’ve got to get help.
And so there’s no mistake: It won’t be easy. Eating disorders are formidable obstacles, and eating disorder treatment is invariably hard. Those eating disorder treatment patients who get better, in the end, are the ones who commit themselves to the eating disorder healing process, and resolve to make eating disorder recovery work for them. Eating disorders, you might say, never die easy. If you’re going to beat yours, you’ve got to be ready for a fight.
Which is precisely why the right eating disorder treatment program is so important, because you’re going to need all the help you can help. Eating disorder treatment works when eating disorder treatment patients are engaged with their own healing processes…and such engagement can only be nurtured by a specially-tailored eating disorder treatment plan. The rub: To get over an eating disorder, you need an eating disorder recovery program designed to meet each and every one of your needs.
It’s in that spirit that the following text lays out the rudimentary framework of the eating disorder recovery process: why eating disorders are so serious, and how eating disorder treatment programs work to combat them. Eating disorder treatment is and can only be a long journey…but every journey starts with a first step, and self-education is a vital precursor to meaningful and lasting eating disorder recovery. Please, for your own sake, let today be the day you start leaning what you need to know.
The Facts About Eating Disorders
To beat an eating disorder, you’ve got to first understand an eating disorder: how it works, and why it’s so difficult to overcome. Eating disorder treatment is most effective, indeed perhaps is only effective, when eating disorder treatment patients play active roles in their own healing…and, as should probably go without saying, you can’t play an active role in anything without seeing it for what it really is. Eating disorder recovery, you might say, has got to be grounded first and foremost in education.
An eating disorder is any consumption-oriented abnormality that jeopardizes an individual’s physical health. Common eating disorders include anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive (or “binge”) eating, which are themselves all ultimately rooted in an eating disorder victim’s abnormal physical and psychological relationship to food. That distorted relationship, in turn, is on its most fundamental level a manifestation of a clinical disease, and so it is that eating disorder treatment patients can only get better by virtue of clinical eating disorder treatment.
Think of it like this: No cancer patient would ever try to beat cancer without enlisting the
support of professional doctors. The same is true for eating disorder victims: If you’re going to get better, you’ve got to get help. An eating disorder, after all, is never a choice; eating disorder victims don’t decide to be sick, and eating disorder patients can’t simply decide to get better. Eating disorder recovery, in the end, has got to be a function of expert eating disorder treatment.
The most important fact about your eating disorder: It’s not your fault. Again, a cancer patient doesn’t choose to have cancer…and an eating disorder victim doesn’t choose to be victimized. Eating disorders shouldn’t provide cause for shame, or guilt, because they exist outside the scope of individual volition. Indeed, the only choice any eating disorder victim can ever really make is that which concerns the decision to seek eating disorder treatment. And with so much on the line, you can’t afford to opt for anything else.
Eating Disorder Treatment
As eating disorders operate on both physical and psychological levels, so it is that eating disorder treatment must pose both physical and psychological solutions to them. Indeed, successful eating disorder treatment is that which treats eating disorder victims in their totality: in mind and in body and in everything in between. At the same time, it’s important to reemphasize that effective eating disorder treatment is and can only be the product of patients’ engagement with the healing process. Again, to beat an eating disorder, you’ve got to play an active role in your own recovery.
The first phase of eating disorder treatment concerns itself primarily with physical healing: with ensuring that eating disorder treatment patients get the emergency nutritional care they need, and with working to alleviate the chemical imbalances that trigger eating disorders in the first place. Most significantly, eating disorders are often linked to irregular levels of the
neurotransmitter serotonin in the human brain, which means that effective eating disorder treatment must often include pharmacological therapies to restore a patient to metabolic normalcy. It’s only with that sort of biochemical stability that eating disorder recovery can go forward.
Of course, such biochemical stability is only a precursor to substantive eating disorder treatment, because again eating disorders themselves are both physical and psychological diseases. Eating disorder recovery that lasts, in the end, must be that which is grounded in thorough emotional and personal growth; eating disorder treatment patients have to learn new ways of relating to food and to themselves if they’re ever going to get better for good. To master an eating disorder, you might say, you’ve first got to be able to master yourself.
And, to reemphasize a point that really should speak for itself: It’s not easy. Eating disorder treatment is a struggle, and eating disorder recovery takes work. No one gets better in an eating disorder treatment center without straining a little along the way…which means that the eating disorder treatment patient who gets healed is more often that not the eating disorder treatment patient who commits himself to the process, and resolves himself to the fight. The bottom line: Your destiny in an eating disorder treatment center is ultimately in your hands. What you do with it is up to you.
Eating Disorders and Depression
As is true of many psychologically-oriented diseases, eating disorders rarely exist in isolation. Of particular note here is the connection between eating disorders and clinical depression: Both conditions have been empirically linked to irregular serotonin levels in the brain, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that eating disorder victims often exhibit symptoms of depressions. 
The important corollary, of course, is that eating disorder treatment patients are often in need of depression counseling, and that effective eating disorder treatment programs must entail comprehensive mental health screenings.
It’s a simple point, really: An eating disorder victim who suffers from depression can’t beat his eating disorder without proper depression treatment. Eating disorder treatment that fails to account for depression, in fact, isn’t really eating disorder treatment at all, and eating disorder recovery that leaves depression untouched is and must be inevitably bound to fail. Eating disorder treatment, in the end, has got to be an all or nothing proposition; if you’re going to get better, you’ve got to do it right.
What that means, of course, is that any competent eating disorder treatment program must be preceded by a thorough mental health screening. The eating disorder treatment center that’s right for you is the one that treats you, all of you, as you really are; eating disorder treatment that works can only be that which addresses every patient as a unique individual. To put it as simply as possible: If you’re an eating disorder victim suffering from depression, your eating disorder treatment plan has got to include depression counseling.
Remember, no one can look for you in the fight against an eating disorder like you can look out for yourself. As you choose an eating disorder treatment center, you’ve got to be the guarantor of your own best interests; if you don’t champion your own cause, no one else will. Please, for your own sake, resolve to find an eating disorder treatment program that’s committed to healing the full scope of your eating disorder. With so much at stake, you can’t afford to settle for anything less.
Eating Disorders and Drug Addiction
Depression, though, isn’t the only correlative affliction to which eating disorder victims are subject. No less importantly, and perhaps even more dangerously, eating disorders can and often do exist in tandem with drug dependency, and eating disorder treatment patients comprise an especially at-risk group for drug addiction and drug abuse. It follows, then, that eating disorder treatment must, when necessary, be administered in conjunction with drug rehab care…and, conversely, that effective drug treatment must take full account of an addict’s susceptibility to acute or chronic eating disorders.
The chemical underpinnings of eating disorders make eating disorder victims especially prone to the whiles of drug addiction. As was true of eating disorders and depression therapy, no eating disorder treatment plan can be effective if it fails to take full account of drug abuse and drug dependency. If an eating disorder treatment patient is also a drug addict, he can’t beat his eating disorder without addiction counseling. There is, in the end, no other way to get better.
It also bears noting here that drug treatment and drug rehab must address any latent or nascent eating disorders in the addiction treatment patient. In fact, there isn’t any practical distinction between an eating disorder victim suffering from drug addiction and an addict suffering from an eating disorder; both individuals need joint eating disorder and addiction treatment, and neither one of them can get better without expert comprehensive care. Again, real healing, be it from an eating disorder or a drug dependency, has got to be holistic healing.
Eating Disorder Recovery
An obvious point, in conclusion: Eating disorder treatment only counts to the extent that it effects full and lasting eating disorder recovery. Eating disorder treatment matters because eating disorder treatment patients matter: because eating disorder treatment patients are real people, who suffer real pain and live real lives. If they’re going to get better, eating disorder treatment patients have got to get better for good. With so much at stake, anything less couldn’t ever cut it.
An eating disorder treatment program can’t be called successful if it only helps patients get better for a few months, or a few years. An eating disorder victim isn’t healed if he relapses, and eating disorder recovery doesn’t count if it’s marked first and foremost by fragility and desperation. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that only those eating disorder treatment programs which account for patients’ long-term health—with established ties to 12-step support groups, for example—are substantively conducive to the eating disorder healing process.
But discussions of long-term health are perhaps best left for the long-term, because the eating disorder healing process can’t start until you take the first step. For now, you know what’s important: You know that you need help to beat your eating disorder, and that the eating disorder treatment program that’s right for you can only be the one which treats you as you actually are. Again, there’s too much at stake here for you to settle for anything less than the most expert and most intimate eating disorder care. For your own sake, and for the sake of the people who care about you, make today the day you start taking control of your future.