Yes, absolutely! Don’t be fooled by the way some psychiatrists discount psychotherapy by calling it “talk therapy”. Many psychiatrists believe that medication is the best option for everyone.
Baloney! It’s the quickest way to get you out of their office and onto drugs. Drugs can’t solve everything. Temporarily removing a symptom of emotional eating or food addiction is just a fix.
When you’re down so low that your body cannot right itself chemically, a prescribed medication by a doctor who is thoroughly familiar with your case, not just your symptoms, can help your body achieve a hormonal balance again.
If drugs could fix every health problem, then you would not have to keep taking them once the problem was fixed. For food addicts, our fix is food, easily accessible and with fewer side effects than drugs.
You stuff food in your face, overeat, ease your lousy day with food, food, and more food and all you get is fat. Then the problem just gets bigger and so do you and so does it, and so do you, and so on and so on.
There is a reason people become food addicts. Most of the time, emotional eating is a symptom of something we’ve pushed deep down inside because we can’t deal with it.
After awhile, we don’t even think about the emotions that drove us to the behavior categorized as food addiction. We don’t remember the event, but we still feel the results of it.
Things that happen to us in our lives that lead us to not simply overeating, but gorging ourselves to the point of pain, nausea, or gross discomfort, cannot be ignored forever.
Psychologists listen, they are very well trained and they know what’s going on. They are not the same as psychiatrists; they do not prescribe medication because they are PhD’s, not MD’s.
If you seek help from a psychologist for your food addiction, they can help you get to the bottom of the feelings that are causing the behavior. If they think that medication is needed, they call in a psychiatrist to prescribe it.
Most food addicts are not medical cases. Some eating disorders are. Binging and Purging can cause serious bodily harm, as can anorexia. If there is a chance that the behavior could cause death, usually that’s a medical case.
However, if you are stuffing down your feelings, talking it out can help a lot. Food addiction isn’t just overating, or occasional emotional eating.
Food addiction is real, and it won’t go away until the thing or things that caused it go away.
The sense of emptiness, loneliness, longing, isolation, and shame that most food addicts feel underneath it all will be released one day.
But first, you have to let go of what caused all those feelings to gang up on you until you couldn’t fight back anymore so you just started eating as a defense.
Therapy can help you speak about those hidden areas of your life and accept them as part of a whole picture, not just a horrible, shameful thing that makes you eat until you are sick because you don’t know what else to do.
You have to learn what else to do for your food addiction besides feeding it. Then you can give yourself a chance to choose something different.
Emotional eating, food addictions, and all that goes along with them, are something that some of us have to deal with–for now, but not forever.
In a moment, now will change. When it does, you can too. Talk about it. Identify your food addiction. Give it a name, and see it for what it is.
Psychologists, mental health counselors–they are resources. Take advantage of the services they have to offer.
Look until you find one you trust enough to talk about your food addictions, and about your life, and you will be amazed at the outcome.