Psychologist Dr. Carol Francis serves Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, El Segundo, San Pedro, Carson, Harbor City, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Long Beach, All of the Los Angeles South Bay Area.
Psychologist, Psychotherapist & Counselor
Marriage, Family and Child Therapist
Certified Medical Hypnotherapist
Eating Disorders
310-543-1824
| Serving the Los Angeles & South Bay Areas
Eating Disorders
Anorexia Nervosa
Anorexia and Cravings:
If you actually fit into the category of anorexia, for you, every morsel of food becomes your enemy as if it will cause you to gain weight and make you grotesquely fat. You spend your day and night fighting cravings for the least amount of any food. Somewhere inside, you have decided that you must be as skinny as possible in order to be beautiful. Or, perhaps you truly enjoy an emotional attraction to being “in control” of the one thing you can absolutely control–the food that passes into your mouth. For you too, the healthy craving for food will likely be your desperate need to fuel your body with essential fuel for survival: minerals, vitamins and amino acids for your body's well-being, and hydration for your parched cells.
For men and women who are absolutely committed to an ideal of being bone skinny, cravings might seem to be your enemy when in actuality every cell in your body might be screaming out for survival. Cravings are actually a loving yearning in these situations that begs for you to decide to act in a manner that invests in your body's life and well-being, not your fashion consciousness or wish for thinness.
Therapies which help individuals with Anorexia can include the following:
Hypnotherapy:
Stress relief, comfortable and healthy hypnotic suggestions that ease cravings or self-destructive choices, and deep, as well as relaxing, self-exploration and issue resolution, uncon-scious and subconscious exploration.
Psychoanalytic insightful work:
Deep connections to historical moments that impact the present. Also Psychoanalytic therapies address traumas, family issues, childhood circumstances, emotional needs for connection, love and understanding and the ability to connect with yourself and others with satisfaction and depth.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy:
CBT provides structured work that help your thoughts and patterns of thinking correspond with the actions you would choose to habituate.
Family Based Therapies:
When working with your family members will help you at-tain your goals or solve or smooth family complications, Family Based Therapies can be very helpful.
Trauma Relief Therapies:
NLP, EFT, Tapping, Attachment Therapies and many other interventions specifically address traumas of abuse (sexual, physical, emotional) that may be related to your eating difficulties.
Body Image Work:
Through Gestalt Psychotherapy, Hypnosis, Movement Therapy and other wonderful interventions, becoming in touch with your body's true beauty, needs, emotional-body based bruises and your body's ability to feel wonderful become the focus of these treatments. Seeing your body as beautiful when healthy is a wonderful experience which is different than seeing your body as acceptable only when too thin and mal-nutritioned.
Nutritional Counseling and Fitness Training play a beautiful part in being healthy and feeling comfortable in tending to the needs of your body for food, nutrition, exercise and pleasant movement. For more insights, you can purchase “If You Can't Stop Eating, Maybe You're Hungry: Reset Your Cravings” by Dr. Carol Francis with key chapters addressing each of these concerns of those facing Anorexia.
For more insights, you can purchase “If You Can't Stop Eating, Maybe You're Hungry: Reset Your Cravings” by Dr. Carol Francis with key chapters addressing each of these concerns of those facing Anorexia.
Bulimia
If in the recent past you have had an inclination to throw-up (purge) food when you over ate, your cravings may actually be associated with a desperate need for nutrition. After all, throwing-up food repeatedly stops you from benefiting from the nutrition of the real food you eat. Throwing-up makes it difficult for your digestive system to absorb the nutrition that actually stays in your body.
In addition, much to your chagrin, as soon as you have eaten food, your body absorbs the fat first. By the time you have purged food, your body has hungrily grabbed the fat it could before you threw-up the food. It was the nutritious part of the food including the fiber (which helps you process fats and keeps your intestinal tract healthy) that you eliminated--not the fats. So if you have been bulimic in your recent past, chances are your current cravings are more about the actual nutrition that your body needs than some addictive, shameful urge to indulge. Bulimia is the term currently used to describe these patterns of eating indulgently and then throwing-up all food in a desperate attempt to minimize the calories that would cause weight gain.
Therapies which help individuals with Anorexia can include the following:
Hypnotherapy:
Stress relief, comfortable and healthy hypnotic suggestions that ease cravings or self-destructive choices, and deep, as well as relaxing, self-exploration and issue resolution, uncon-scious and subconscious exploration.
Psychoanalytic insightful work:
Deep connections to historical moments that impact the present. Also Psychoanalytic therapies address traumas, family issues, childhood circumstances, emotional needs for connection, love and understanding and the ability to connect with yourself and others with satisfaction and depth.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy:
CBT provides structured work that help your thoughts and patterns of thinking correspond with the actions you would choose to habituate.
Family Based Therapies:
When working with your family members will help you at-tain your goals or solve or smooth family complications, Family Based Therapies can be very helpful.
Trauma Relief Therapies:
NLP, EFT, Tapping, Attachment Therapies and many other interventions specifically address traumas of abuse (sexual, physical, emotional) that may be related to your eating difficulties.
Body Image Work:
Through Gestalt Psychotherapy, Hypnosis, Movement Therapy and other wonderful interventions, becoming in touch with your body's true beauty, needs, emotional-body based bruises and your body's ability to feel wonderful become the focus of these treatments. Seeing your body as beautiful when healthy is a wonderful experience which is different than seeing your body as acceptable only when too thin and mal-nutritioned.
Nutritional Counseling and Fitness Training play a beautiful part in being healthy and feeling comfortable in tending to the needs of your body for food, nutrition, exercise and pleasant movement. For more insights, you can purchase “If You Can't Stop Eating, Maybe You're Hungry: Reset Your Cravings” by Dr. Carol Francis with key chapters addressing each of these concerns of those facing Anorexia.
For more insights, you can purchase “If You Can't Stop Eating, Maybe You're Hungry: Reset Your Cravings” by Dr. Carol Francis with key chapters addressing each of these concerns of those facing Anorexia.
Over-Eating, Binging, Compulsive Over-Eating
Over-eating food can be related to depression, anxiety, compulsiveness, impulsiveness, malnutrition, low self-love, sexual, physical or emotional abuse, society pressures, family eating habits, or simple food-choices which actually cause hunger. Individualizing your approach to learning to eat, enjoy food and not over-eat is the focus of Dr. Carol Francis' therapies.
Consider the following tools:
Book by Dr. Carol Francis: If You Can't Stop Eating, Maybe You're Hungry: Reset Your Cravings Order the Paperback or Download your copy now.
If you eat everything in sight whether you are hungry or not, the only portion of your body you are probably aware of is your mouth. For you, food is the pleasure it creates while you smell, chew, taste, and create a sensations in your mouth or perhaps in the fullness of your belly. Over-eating may be your way of enjoying that very small places in your body over and over again.
Individuals also become compelled to eat compulsively when they are unknowingly experiencing a po-tential state of medical malnutrition, hormonal imbalance, thirst, medication side-effects, or illness states. Perhaps your body is failing to absorb certain nutrients, iron for example, and your compulsive hunger is your body's attempt to achieve a certain level of that nutrient. Perhaps you are in the throes of estrogen and progesterone imbalance which aggravates appetite as the body signals, through crav-ings, that it needs more or less of that hormone to function well. Perhaps a medication managing your depression, hypertension, back pain, or anxiety is actually “turning-on” your appetite brain centers, causing bodily signals to eat to exceed your actually need for calories. Prednisone, for example, can put weight on quickly and increase appetite hugely. Such weight is very hard to eliminate.
You owe it to yourself to have these physiological conditions carefully examined so that the medical diagnosis can help you know how you need to respond to your appetite. Your chronic hunger may be a symptom of a condition that your body wishes to convey. Do not assume that your chronic hunger is a lack of will-power or some of the other factors we will discuss below unless you have had a full medi-cal evaluation to rule out these other complications. Be aware, not all doctors will be sympathetic to your attempt to clarify what your chronic hunger may be indicating about your physical/medical com-plications. Choose your diagnostician wisely. Over-eating confuses many doctors.
If your chronic over-eating is related to your focus upon your mouth's pleasure sensations, becoming aware of all the other sensations in your body, including smell, touch, and even the sensation of full-ness, will allow you to integrate your craving for food into your relationship with your entire body, not just sensations of your mouth. Enjoy chewing, tasting, and swallowing but also enjoy the sensations of fullness, visual pleasures of your surroundings, memories of the day that were positive or the social interactions that richly accent the meal time. Broaden your awareness of pleasures beyond your mouth as much as possible. More tricks and information are contained in my book, “If You Can't Stop Eating, Maybe You're Hungry.” (link with the following: http://www.lulu.com/shop/dr-carol-francis/if-you-cant-stop-eating-maybe-youre-hungry-reset-your-food-cravings/ebook/product-18559129.html )