I have been treating patients who struggle with eating disorders for more than 35 years, and even with this experience, the expression of sadness reflected in the patients’ looks when they come to the office for the first time continues to cause me deep shock. As if they were trapped in a dark labyrinth, unable to escape their own destructive thoughts. Battling daily against the voice of pathology. It’s hard to explain how something as essential as food can become your worst enemy.
It’s all about losing weight or trying to figure out how to stop a cycle of restrictions and binge eating.
Society bombards us with unattainable models of beauty, intensifying insecurities that are the gateway to an ED.
In recent years the numbers have grown, and after the pandemic they showed a new profile: very high demand, younger ages and highly emotionally deregulated patients. The level of confusion and pain of families in these situations is extreme.
As I describe in my book “The Empire of Thinness”, these disorders are psychological pathologies with potential nutritional consequences. There are conflicts of identity, maturation, self-esteem, trauma, among others, so it is not only that they relearn to eat that is the objective of a treatment, but that after stabilizing their eating symptoms, they can find the roots of their suffering and overcome it.
For this reason, a treatment cannot only be approached from food, but devices must be built that articulate diverse therapies, in different areas of the person who suffers from them. At Family Clinic we do it from an integrated interdisciplinary logic. That is, teams from various health fields working together in the same space, avoiding the multiplicity of opinions and poorly connected spaces between treating professionals.
Currently and thanks to new technologies, it has allowed us to provide our treatments virtually and thus reach any corner of the country with our proposal.
New disorders are being added, binge eating disorder, often confused with simple obesity and which is more of a form of food addiction, is by far the one that most people currently suffer from, although paradoxically it is the one that least demands help.
That is why prevention, from the family and school, becomes essential. By installing early detection and prevention programs, we can help these disorders become risky diseases.
Contact information:
Instagram: @Psi.fabianmelamed
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.clinicadefamilia.org
by CEDOC