FOOD ADDICTION AND EATING DISORDERS

Food can become an addiction for people with an Eating Disorder. Liana Salvucci is a qualified Eating Disorder Practitioner and celebrates many years in Recovery herself.

She works with recovering compulsive overeaters, bulimics and anorexics to help them stop using food to cope with life. Instead she helps each client to achieve a life "beyond their wildest dreams".

Liana’s particular expertise lies in helping people in recovery from food addition to:

• become successful entrepreneurs
• overcome underearning
• attract prosperity in their lives
• turning their vision into reality
• doing all of this by putting their recovery their top priority
  

HOW LIANA WILL WORK WITH YOU

THE EATING DISORDER RECOVERY COACHING PROGRAMME

The Eating Disorder Recovery Coaching Programme is a workable, effective, proven method to help the client recover from food addiction. It’s based on action and divided into four components:

1. Reality Check around food and body image obsession

This starts with a detailed Lyfestyle Questionnaire to check:

- when and how the disorder or addiction started in your life (very often with a diet)
- whether you actually have an eating disorder or you are just a comfort eater
- what else has been tried to sort out the problem
- the level of severity of the disorder to decide whether you are coachable or you need to be referred for therapy    or treatment and if so appropriately referred
- to understand at what stage of your recovery you are or as Prochaska would say at what Stage of Change:    PRE CONTEMPLATION, CONTEMPLATION, PREPARATION, ACTION, MAINTENANCE AND RELAPSE

During the first session you and Liana will clarify what the client wants to achieve out of coaching and will make a plan to strategize how to get there.

Short, medium and long term goals regarding food and other areas of your life are established so that the coach and help you to prioritize and identify where you will want to start.

I would also have you fill in my “Recovery Workbook” to complete, in order to identify other major areas you need to work on.

This workbook includes things like the Wheel of Life and other Coaching questionnaires to help you get more clarity and focus on what needs to be addressed in your life. Compulsive Eaters often have too much on their “plates” and if they are “cross addicts” they try to do too much at the same time, therefore get too tired and resort to extra food for comfort and a kick.”

2. The Road Map to Recovery

Second, we start working on your goals.

Having identified the main areas that need more attention, we start working on your actual goals for your recovery being often:

• Mainly weight loss or weight gain
• Unhealthy Relationships with their family of origin
• Co-dependent Relationships
• Wrong Associations with food
• Lack of vision
• Low Self Esteem and Lack of Self Confidence
• Under or over achieving issues that normally go with under earning or financial insecurity issues
• Work Life Balance (as many overeaters tend to get too much on board and have to resort to food as a crutch to cope with exceeding demands from themselves)

Having identified the main areas that need addressing weekly baby steps will be agreed at every session and monitored. Food addicts get overwhelmed very easily and baby steps work better than giant steps.

3. Your Unique Structure of your Eating Disorder Recovery

“Monitoring results and asking Provocative Questions is one of the ways I can increase my client’s level of awareness and challenge you to brainstorm different options available, without imposing any, till you find a strategy YOU FEEL CONFIDENT AND COMMITTED TO.”

4. Sustainability and Maintenance

Maintenance doesn’t just stand for weight loss or weight gain maintenance but about maintaining their achievements and recovery on the emotional, spiritual, professional and financial level and start building on that.

As part for Maintenance To avoid Relapse or Slips which occur much more often with food than any other substance, the clients need to have:

• A strategy and
• A support system in place which will be different for each single client

Lastly, once you have fully implemented and understand your Roadmap, Formula and Structure, you will be able to use them to adjust more easily in any major life transitions. You and Liana will evaluate your achievements, plan on how to celebrate them, and give yourself credit and/or a reward for them, before you move on to your next challenges.

Liana will ask you to write a “Future Letter” about what your VISION of your best possible future is, so that you will know what you will be working towards, with me or on your own.

TOOLS OF RECOVERY

At the foundation of Coaching is the belief that each client is “creative, resourceful and whole” therefore my role as a coach is always to empower the client to find his/her own path to recovery and never impose a specific way to recover as the “only way;” as a Coach I give client choices and then monitor the outcomes of the strategy the client chooses.

What I have found to be effective during the years working with food addicts are the following 4 tools.

1.The first tool is a “Food Plan"

First of all looking together at their diets or Food Plan. Working with a Food Diary is of paramount importance for this.

Writing on their Food Diaries (whose format I send to them by email or post) with the foods the had, where, the level of hunger, the emotions just before and after the meal and whether they vomited or used laxatives after that, will give the client and the coach a lot of information and awareness about areas of the client’s life that need to be addressed, like if they eat when angry with their partners, or don’t eat in front of others and so on.

Food, unlike alcohol or drugs, is not a substance from which the addict can completely abstain. The person still needs to eat at least 2 to 3 times a day to maintain a healthy life and have the necessary energy to concentrate and carry on daily activities. For this reason the concept of “abstinence” from food is not as clear-cut as it is for other addictions and food plans are completely different from one client to another

I would always refer them to the Nutritionist I work closely with, or any Nutritionist or Dietician they trust, but I straightway start working with them on “stop using” and only in case the client doesn’t have a food plan I would recommend my own written FOOD PLAN based on the following Four guidelines which I have seen working incredibly well for my self, in fellows in recovery and many of my clients.

They are:

• Limiting their “binges” to only three balanced and nutritious meals a day (or with a couple of snacks in between if the doctor identifies a sugar level imbalance).
  This confines eating to specific moments of the day so that the addict “can deal with life between meals, and face fears instead of running away from them.”
  
  
• Avoiding sugar and refined carbohydrates, e.g., sweets and white flour (including white pasta, pizza, bread, breaded meat, etc.). Sugar and flour should always be listed in the fifth position or lower in the ingredients list of a product, as this indicates a low content. Reaction to sugar and refined carbohydrates has been thoroughly studied and the effect that these can have on food addicts is the same as alcohol for an alcoholic.
  
  
• Avoiding all “trigger foods”. By “trigger foods” we mean those foods that trigger an urge to binge, or simply to eat more food than necessary after a normal balanced meal. These vary from person to person but they normally are (apart from the foods listed before like sugar, refined carbs and white flour): cheese, peanut butter, crisps, chips, etc.
  It is equally true that for some food addicts it is not about which food they are using on (as it could be anything) but about the circumstances, and the compulsion they experience whilst eating.
  
  
• Plan meals in advance. Food addicts don’t have the ability to make healthy and sound choices around food. Writing down and sticking to a plan made in advance takes away the worry about food and enables the Food Addict to concentrate on “life” instead, so she can deal with everyday challenges without resorting to extra food for comfort.

2. The second tool is a “Support System”

As a Recovery Coach I would encourage you to find other levels of support apart from coaching such as:

• 12 step Programmes where lots of help is available in OA, OAHOW and Food Addict Anonymous
• Ttreatment centres if the severity of the illness has got to a critical level
• Nutritional intervention (as I have mentioned before)
• Psychoterapy or Conselling, if there are past issues which coaching and NLP are unable to assist the client with

3.The third tool is “exercise”

I would always empower my clients to find a sport they really enjoy doing instead of a sport that is punitive and only directed to “calorie burning”.

Exercising will have an enourmously positive impact on:

• their mood
• .their craving and hunger level
• their body image
• of course in keeping fit and healthy

It is also true that some clients stop wanting to exercise at the beginning of their Recovery Programme, as exercise used to be part of their addictive behaviour and it is equally fine for them not to in that case for some time.