Eating Disorders

Maybe you wake up thinking about food and fretting about what you’ll eat each day. Perhaps you struggle to get dressed because none of your clothes fit the way you want them to and you can’t stop agonizing over your body in the mirror. In the end, your obsession with food and weight could make it hard to focus and lead to reduced productivity at work or in school. Deep down, maybe you think to yourself: If I could just lose weight, I’d be happier and everything would be okay. As a result, you may be considering seeing a therapist who specializes in treating eating disorders.

Your worries about food could make social events extra stressful.

If you’re dealing with an eating disorder, going out and socializing could be hard for you. After all, the majority of everyday social interactions revolve around food. When friends invite you to dinner, perhaps you don’t know how to respond. You might end up cancelling lots of plans so that you don’t have to deal with the awkwardness of refusing food that’s offered to you. What’s more, you might want time alone so that you can purge or binge in privacy.

Over time, this kind of life can lead to loneliness and disconnection. You may feel distant from friends and family because of how much your eating disorder consumes you.

If you want to live a life that’s free from food obsession as well as body shame and self-criticism, we encourage you to connect with us. At Therapy for Women in Philadelphia, we specialize in empowering women to boost their self-image, recover from eating disorders, and cultivate healthier relationships with food and weight.

Eating disorders are the byproduct of a fatphobic, weight-crazed world.

Eating disorders have been on the rise for decades, as women face increasing pressure to maintain a certain body type and are more likely to be objectified than men. Our culture is deeply fatphobic—so many people are shamed for how they look and judged if they don’t conform to societal notions of beauty. Part of the problem is that our culture equates health with body size, as if you can tell how healthy someone is just by looking at them. We also tend to think that everyone can be skinny if they just eat right and exercise.

Although we as a culture are starting to challenge these myths, we still have a long way to go. The body-positive moment has made incredible strides, but magazines, billboards, and Instagram are still dominated by unrealistic depictions of skinniness. Even if we know that these depictions are photoshopped or altered in some way, it’s still hard to feel good about how we look if we don’t see other body types and shapes being celebrated.

Negative body image is especially prevalent among teen girls.

Teen girls today are more exposed to social media and the internet than any other generation, so they have to deal with unrealistic body standards very early in life. They face endless opportunities to scrutinize how they look and be subjected to judgment from anonymous strangers online. What’s more, the models and beauty influencers they look up to are not the average American teenage girl—they’re usually fully-grown adults who represent the most extreme levels of fitness and thinness.

This unhealthy comparison culture is the number-one driver of negative self-image among young women today, and it’s a huge reason eating disorders continue to afflict them. Therapy is a chance to step away from this comparison culture, challenge false beliefs about body size and weight, and learn to see yourself in a more positive and empowering light.