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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".
Lianas 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. Its 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 clients
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 doesnt 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 clients life that need
to be addressed, like if they eat when angry with their partners,
or dont 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 doesnt 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 dont 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.
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