What Every Therapist Needs to Know about Treating Eating and Weight Issues
Karen R. Koenig
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0393705587
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Therapists often encounter clients with mild to moderate eating and weight issues, less severe than anorexia, bulimia, or binge-eating disorder. They emerge as minor themes that lurk behind major presenting problems such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, trauma, and marital discord; and therapists who aren't looking for them may miss opportunities.
Koenig’s book is written for practitioners who lack expertise in this area, and provides clinical strategies and therapeutic techniques to explore clients’ feelings about food and their bodies to get at the root of these issues. It includes descriptions of how food and weight problems surface in conjunction with psychological and medical conditions, as well as how they create difficulties in various life stages and situations. Packed with insights and practical tips, this unique book teaches clinicians how to help clients make peace with food and the scale and balance nutrition and exercise in a healthy lifestyle.
attractive as you can be. Don’t look too good or it’s your fault if you get hit on. You’ll only snag a man/woman if you look good. Being fat precludes being/feeling sexual. Being thin means you have to be sexual. You must look muscular and trim to be a turn-on. Revealing your body means you must want to have sex. The way these messages collide and cancel each other out makes a person’s head spin. Worse, they make it very confusing to know exactly how to feel about and what to do with the sexual
life as well. CHAPTER 3 The Biology of Eating and Weight As therapists, we watch as theories about human dysfunction come and go. For a long time, conditions such as alcoholism and drug addiction were viewed and treated according to either a moral or a medical disease model. The understanding and treatment of eating and weight problems have followed along this path as well. The moral approach maintained that folks who drank in excess or abused drugs lacked willpower and self-control and
hypothalamus’s ongoing assessment of chemical comings and goings. At its simplest, the main components of this chemical information system are ghrelin, which is produced in the stomach and signals that the stomach is ready for a meal, and hormones such as leptin and insulin, which act on cell receptors to influence hunger. Leptin and insulin also have another role on this information grid: Along with glucose and peptides PYY (peptide tyrosine tyrosine) and cholecystokinin (CCK), they promote
enough with her body to reach out and give her client whatever she needs to reach her goals. She may sometimes be a role model, may other times join and commiserate with the client about genetic loading, and still other times use nothing but her clinical skills to help the client examine and resolve her eating difficulties. What is most important is that a therapist recognize that body weight can be a transference and a countertransference issue and use both to keep the client moving forward.
the most commonly prescribed appetite suppressants in the United States. Then there are the FDA-approved lipase inhibitors Meridia and Xenical, which reduce the body’s ability to absorb fat. A popular, over-the-counter lipase inhibitor is the drug Alli (a.k.a. generic orlistat). “Off label” drugs (which are FDA-approved for one condition and used to treat another) are also used to promote weight loss. Antidepressants have been known to aid weight loss, but most only work for a short period of