Treatment for Purging and Chew-Spitting

Purging is a common eating disorder symptom often overlooked as a pernicious and insidious behavior. Too often treatment providers are very critical of purging without understanding the true reason why some people feel a strong urge to do so. Along with chew-spitting (chewing and spitting out food), these two compulsions often linger and resurface throughout the process of getting better.

Purging and chew-spitting both typically start as an attempt to manage fear of eating what feels like too much food, whether or not it is a binge. They rarely begin as intentional but rather as a way to undo eating that feels too overwhelming and terrifying to tolerate.

Binging can be involved in the process but often is not. The compulsive behaviors become the focus of many people’s eating disorder over time and can be difficult to stop.

These two behaviors have a very powerful and immediate emotional impact. They change the person’s mood and decrease anxiety almost immediately. Not only is the food eaten part of what feels overwhelming, but the intensity of the feelings preceding the action also feels too strong to bear and is wiped away almost immediately by purging or chew-spitting.

People who find purging or chew-spitting a powerfully calming tool incorporate these behaviors as a coping strategy at a young age. Over time, both can become a seamless part of daily life. Purging is very easy for many people and involves little effort. Chew-spitting becomes something people can do, even in public, without anyone noticing.

Also because these behaviors start at a young age, they don’t find other ways to tolerate or cope with the discomfort of intense emotion. Instead, they use these actions to manage their emotional state and go forward in their lives.

One big problem is there is no incentive or desire to learn other ways to live, and these eating disorder behaviors result in larger problems over time: incompatibility with relationships, limited psychological and emotional development and intense shame and guilt.

By the time someone is ready to try to stop the behaviors, they are very ingrained and almost automatic.

The treatment for these compulsive behaviors starts with cognitive behavioral therapy, namely food logs to identify triggers for purging or chew-spitting. Following the first steps, the core work focuses on learning new ways to identify emotions, process that awareness and learn how to tolerate the internal discomfort of having these feelings.

Sometimes the treatment is straightforward if the person can identify and manage the emotions more easily. For others, the compulsions are so woven into daily life that taking away the behaviors feels like ripping away the emotional fabric of their entire lives.

In addition, trying to separate shame from the behaviors is central to the treatment. Shame almost always reinforces the actions, but these are compulsions that often feel addictive and not within a person’s immediate control. Compassion for oneself makes a big difference in learning to be patient while making changes.

Purging and chew-spitting need attention in eating disorder treatment and have clear paths toward getting well. The therapy must reinforce the concept of the behaviors as compulsions to learn about and work on with compassion. That openness will allow for an understanding conversation over time and lead the way to get better.

A Meaningful Therapeutic Relationship is the First Step Towards Recovery

Recent posts address new parts of eating disorder treatment that are on the forefront of how to recover in today’s climate: the cultural and personal effect of the GLP-1’s and the overarching changes due to private equity investment in residential programs. As critical as those topics are, nothing changes the central pillar of treatment: the strength of primary therapeutic relationships.

Starting with the dawn of modern treatment for eating disorders in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, therapists versed in care for people with eating disorders knew that recovery needed an open, trusting, profound relationship in order to start the process of really getting well.

Eating disorders in almost every iteration cause severe isolation, reliance on a set of thoughts and behaviors that are powerful but all encompassing and a litany of shame, guilt and blame from all corners of modern society. A disorder people almost always fall into at a young age creates a prison from which there appears to be no escape.

A primary relationship opens a window out of the prison and, over time, invites the person stuck in the eating disorder to try stepping outside the cell to see what life might be like otherwise.

In the daylight, life is not sunshine and rainbows. Moving away from an eating disorder allows for opportunities to grow, learn and change many elements of life, but those changes can be painful and hard at times even if sometimes the results can be uplifting or exhilarating too.

The promise of a wonderful life at the end of recovery is not even close to the truth. The possibility for fulfillment and finding meaning is within one’s grasp without the eating disorder keeping that person in prison.

The primary therapeutic relationship allows for open conversation, time to explore emotions and thoughts and the option for true growth into a person no longer mired in disordered thoughts and behaviors and instead able to engage with the world.

The treatment world is increasingly filled with residential programs run like a mill, online treatment by anonymous clinicians and virtual work which allows both sides to hide behind a screen. As much as the increased access to care is necessary, the focus of treatment must remain on the clinical relationship. Trust and care are the bedrock of meaningful recovery. Openness and honesty allow for the personal growth needed to move away from complete reliance on an eating disorder.

I will continue to address the ways eating disorders and the treatment field change since these factors affect the process of recovery greatly. However, the fundamentals of treatment remain unchanged. A meaningful primary therapeutic relationship will always be the necessary foundation to get well.

Body Image Work in Eating Disorder Treatment

Body image thoughts are almost always the hardest part of any eating disorder recovery. Although not everyone has these thoughts and may have other difficult parts of recovery, body image tends to be a big challenge to address.

First, body image is subjective. Even if clinicians can counter body image norms in many different ways, these data points aren’t very convincing. Besides, we process our own body image very differently from other bodies. There is some compelling research to show that processing one’s own body image uses non-visual brain centers. So body image is likely more about self-perception than it is about what we see in the mirror. It’s hard to convince someone to see themselves differently when they aren’t even seeing themselves at all.

Second, body image and weight are markers for people to assess their success or failure. Each morning on the scale or each day trying on an outfit is a referendum. Is today a good day or bad day? Can I feel good today or need I feel awful? Too many people with eating disorders conflate appearance with well-being in a very automatic, unconscious way. Taking away this assessment would leave them with no way to function that day.

Third, body image is everywhere. We are bombarded with media and photos of people all day long. When body positivity was prevalent, at least some of those bodies were not extremely thin. In the GLP-1 era, bodies are all extremely thin again in media and even in shrinking celebrities, family or friends. It’s hard to address body image when the world presents a very different message.

Work on body image takes a circuitous route. The focus in recovery must be more profound from the start and center on what matters in life, whether that is work, family, friends or community. People in recovery need to look inward and find a path that matters to them which, to start out, is at least as important as body image.

At first this new path may only compete with body image rights for attention. Through the process of getting well, a new focus can begin to replace and hopefully supersede the all consuming body image thoughts.

In the end, the body image concerns can still exist and insert itself into one’s consciousness. There is a big difference between intermittent body thoughts and an all consuming focus. Life needs to mean more than distorted and disturbing body image thoughts and be about other things that matter a whole lot more.

Eating Disorder Treatment Reimagined: Proper Diagnosis and Treatment of All Associated Illnesses

Eating disorders primarily are seen as psychiatric disorders in the medical system. Even though much of the treatment focuses on stabilization of food and health, which are necessary components of treatment, the success of long-term treatment rests in the hands of mental health clinicians.

There are a number of factors which led to this clinical decision: the lack of knowledge about the biological causes of eating disorders, the social construct and expectations around food and weight and the cultural dynamic of thinness which handcuffs women.

Reservoirs of health insurance money engendered a recent takeover of the eating disorder treatment field by private equity companies. Accordingly, the system is even more organized around ineffective mental health treatment and less about healing and getting well. Any progress integrating medical and mental health treatment is not a priority at the moment.

Years of experience treating people, primarily women, with eating disorders revealed to me that there are a host of misunderstood, complex illnesses for many people with chronic eating disorders.

The cohort of patients who typically fall into eating disorder symptoms without much volition and stay very sick often don’t benefit from current eating disorder treatment. It may very well be that these people are treated for a psychiatric disorder when the primary issue also includes an underlying medical problem that is not addressed.

In recent posts, I have written about EDS, MCAS and other disorders that appear to be linked with eating disorders. These illnesses are some of the medical struggles people with eating disorders face without any diagnosis or treatment from doctors. People with chronic eating disorders also can have hormonal disorders, swallowing disorders, neurological disorders and many other issues. Rarely are the medical issues treated. Instead, doctors blame all physical symptoms on the eating disorder, and thus on the patient, for not getting better.

What needs to be considered for people with chronic eating disorders is to include medical screening in a comprehensive treatment plan for these patients.

Outpatient treatment with therapy and nutrition counseling is critical for recovery. Food stabilization and therapeutic work around learning how to live without the eating disorder remain essential to get well.

However, too many people stay sick, and providers tend to give up in one way or another so these patients only blame themselves for their illness and become hopeless. These outcomes are inexcusable.

Doctors need to be more involved in all elements of eating disorder treatment for these patients to get well, and the field needs to consider all other medical illnesses and incorporate a wider net of diagnosis and treatment to help more people truly get well.

New Directions for the Medical Treatment of Eating Disorders

There is a sweeping change coming to eating disorder treatment in the near future. The connection between the onset and severity of eating disorders and an assortment of vaguely defined illnesses is likely to play a role in early diagnosis and care for people with eating disorders, especially anorexia. If there is enough interest in the medical field, these new changes may profoundly change the scope of eating disorder treatment from purely psychological to a combination of medical and psychological conditions.

Some patients with eating disorders respond quickly to standard eating disorder treatment. Many of these patients seek treatment early, more often exhibit binging and purging symptoms and have thoughts mostly focused on weight before seeking any treatment. Regulation of meals, education about diet culture and prioritization of health and well being, all central to standard treatment, can right the course fairly quickly.

These patients are a substantial population of the people getting help for an eating disorder, but they are not even the majority.

A large percentage of people have intractable symptoms not focused on food and weight which are the core factors in their eating disorder. In addition, they often develop symptoms for a multitude of other reasons unrelated to diet culture and have unexplained and often ignored medical symptoms that are deemed unrelated.

As I have written about in this blog recently, a host of other medical illnesses appear to have some connection to eating disorders, especially anorexia. The most common ones are Ehlers Danlos syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome and general inflammatory/autoimmune symptoms. The first is a genetic variant which leads to looser connective tissue, the second a varied illness with multi-organ effects and the third consists of chronic pain and discomfort. They are minimally researched, and the medical establishment shows little interest.

A final common diagnosis connected with the above is hypersensitivity, a vague title meant to indicate acute sensitivity to sensory input and emotional input. The symptoms of this condition play a role in the extreme difficulty and pain some people experience upon eating, but there is even less information about this condition.

These four together don’t generate much interest from the medical community yet impair the lives of so many women and are strongly linked to eating disorders.

Many medication treatments are now options for people with these symptoms: low dose naltrexone (an anti-inflammatory), many mast cell medications such as Cromolyn, cetrizine and famotidine and even very low dose GLP-1’s being studied for severe anorexia.

The progress in diagnosis and treatment thus far is nonexistent, but some providers have begun to look for new ways to approach chronic eating disorders.

I hope we clinicians look back at the blame I wrote about in the last few posts as a sign of ignorance and instead begin to show interest in some of the underlying medical issues related to eating disorders. Current eating disorder treatment guidelines help some people, but we need better options for a large number of people seeking help.

The Antidote to the Three False Beliefs of Eating Disorder Treatment

The three false tenets of eating disorder treatment—blame, “full recovery” and ultimatums—are an unfortunate byproduct of poor clinical decision making that causes more harm than good. The three falsehoods often become foundational beliefs for people with eating disorders and cause significant psychological harm to patients seeking help. As a result, patients need therapy to recognize the beliefs as false and reverse the detrimental effects on their own recovery.

First and foremost, no one ought to blame themselves for an eating disorder. Many factors lead to the start of an eating disorder, and they all have one thing in common: no one chooses to get sick. People surreptitiously fall into disordered behavior like restricting, overexercising, binging or purging and find that the physical and emotional effects of these actions are very powerful. These behaviors may lead to an emotional release, physiological improvement in symptoms or even relief from the effects of an undiagnosed medical issue. Every single person in treatment needs to know the eating disorder is not their fault.

Second, everyone’s path to get well is individualized. I often lay out broad strokes of what recovery looks like when I first meet patients, but those are only general suggestions of the paths people take. There is no right way to get better with one correct end result. Life in recovery still has the ups and downs of anyone’s life but is no longer dominated by the torturous thoughts and behaviors of an eating disorder. The idea of a “full recovery” only places more blame and shame on the person already struggling and doesn’t reflect the reality of getting better.

Last, there is no place for threats in recovery. If clinicians are unsure how to help a patient, it’s the responsibility of the provider to look for help, not to place that onus on the patient for not getting better fast enough.

The through line of these three erroneous beliefs about eating disorder treatment uncovers the consistent message of blame on the patient for having an eating disorder and for not getting better. Treatment focused on blame insists that there is only one way to get better. Either the plan works for you or it’s your fault.

Healing from misguided treatment necessitates a clear message: blame and shame don’t belong in any eating disorder treatment setting. The antidote to this approach of poor care is treatment grounded in compassion, kindness and sincerity.

At the heart of an eating disorder is the internal critical voice telling someone how they are a horrible, despicable person. The message from providers needs to reinforce the opposite so the person knows they are good and instead are sick and need help in order to get well.

It’s not a lot to ask of any provider, yet it’s often hard to find kindness when seeking help for an eating disorder. This clear approach to eating disorder treatment and to the person struggling can go a long way to help people get well.

Ultimatums Don’t Work in Eating Disorder Treatment

Eating disorders are considered difficult to treat. Several factors such as our collective obsession with food and weight, the entrenched nature of eating behavior, disordered or not, the strong connection between eating disorders and identity and the underlying medical issues all create a tangled web once treatment starts that many people call difficult.

As a result, ultimatums either to eat more or go to residential treatment have long been a staple in eating disorder treatment. The premise is that a patient needs a concrete goal to attain with clear consequences, if not punishment, if they fail. Ultimatums end with either the treatment team summarily dropping the patient or the patient complying. Some people see compliance as a good outcome to stabilize nutrition and health but at the expense of autonomy and psychological growth needed to get better from an eating disorder.

Clinicians benefit greatly from ultimatums. They feel as if they are standing up for what is best for the patient and simultaneously holding their ground for the right next step. Clinicians can escape a situation they’re not sure they can handle in a way that is completely accepted in the treatment community. They feel absolved of any responsibility and can fully hold the patient accountable for their decisions.

In my estimation, clinicians benefit greatly from ultimatums. After trying as hard as they believe they can, treatment providers have an easy escape hatch in order to end the therapy unscathed and feel little remorse for the outcome.

Ultimatums give little solace or hope to the people seeking help. There are three clear ways patients suffer when ultimatums are a part of the protocol.

Patients understand that the ultimatum implies that the lack of progress is their own fault due to not trying hard enough. The clear message is that an eating disorder is not an illness but a choice, and true recovery demands the patient just try harder.

Second, patients realize they can’t trust their providers. If the team were on their side, patients would be able to be honest about the strong pull towards eating disorder thoughts and symptoms and how and why it is incredibly difficult to get better. It’s harder to trust a team willing to use the information patients share as part of a threat to stop treatment.

Last, patients learn through an ultimatum that they are truly on their own. More than food or weight, eating disorders provide a failsafe, reliable source of comfort and support. The emotional benefit of the eating disorder thoughts and behaviors provide comfort in ways people can’t. Recovery means learning how to find imperfect comfort elsewhere and understanding how and why relying on people creates a much more fulfilling life. Ultimatums make it clear that providers can’t even provide support so how can anyone else help.

When clinicians feel the urge to use an ultimatum, they need to look inward as to why they are feeling so hopeless and powerless to help the person with an eating disorder. The multitude of layers to an eating disorder are incredibly complex. Any therapy deeply involved in treating someone with an eating disorder will become difficult and even frightening to a provider.

Clinicians can look for outside help, seek second opinions or consultations, dive deeper into the complexity or find medical help to ensure the patient is stable while treatment progresses. Looking to an ultimatum to solve this personal dilemma always prioritizes the provider’s concerns over the patient’s needs.

Recovery from an Eating Disorder is Different from “Full Recovery”

For many years, the term recovery described the process of getting well from an eating disorder. The all encompassing concept reflected a person engaged in treatment with the end goal of living a life no longer dominated by an eating disorder and with the freedom of making one’s own choices about how to live.

Coined in substance abuse treatment, recovery speaks to a state of mind for both the patient and treatment providers of a similar goal: to disempower the eating disorder over time and open doors to a fuller life. Recovery implies progress and hope. The term reflects a years-long process which can ease the discomfort of the hard days by remembering the positive changes happening over time.

The private equity-funded eating disorder treatment programs co-opted the term and changed it in subtle but profound ways. People are much less likely to talk about recovery anymore and instead to proselytize about “full recovery.” I use the quotations intentionally because this concept itself is erroneous and changes the meaning of the term and the connotation of recovery as a whole.

“Full recovery” means the holy grail, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the fantasy that a life completely free from the eating disorder is imminently and immediately available if you only try hard enough. Clinicians at programs can use this term to browbeat patients to comply with rules or to shame them into believing they are the problem, not the illness itself.

There are several problems with this idea. First, hard work in treatment does not land you in a fantasy world where the eating disorder is wiped clean and magically disappears. Recovery is a process over time and the eating disorder will recede but there is no nirvana at the end. Second, life is always complicated and messy so people almost always experience eating disorder thoughts even when they are well but know the thoughts can’t derail their lives anymore. Third, at the heart of the term is promising the impossible, a time when the eating disorder just goes away because one works “hard enough.”

Rather than promote the reality of the process of recovery and the true nature of the daily struggle of getting well over time, “full recovery” implies that if you try hard enough now, you’ll find a world where life is just easy and simple, where you get everything you want easily. Life is never that way, and it’s cruel, if not sadistic, to promise something that does not exist and use that promise to coerce people to follow guidelines.

Fundamentally, the term only reinforces the feeling of blame that surrounds people with eating disorders. Since they didn’t try hard enough, it’s their fault they didn’t get better. And on top of that, they should be ashamed of themselves for not getting better.

We need to return to the idea that recovery is a long process that focuses on stabilizing food, learning about the emotional and psychological forces hidden by the eating disorder, discovering who you are and finding how to live in the world. It’s not easy and takes time but will allow the person to live their own life not dominated by the thoughts and actions of an eating disorder.

Blame Has No Place in Eating Disorder Treatment

The inception of blame as a pillar of an eating disorder is rooted in our collective idealization of thinness. Body size and shape has become an ever more central factor in defining achievement and success, control and determination, willpower and attention. Society dictates that we should all strive to be as thin as possible at all cost. Any failure is our own fault.

The issue in eating disorder treatment is the expansion of the idea of blame about not being thin enough to blame about all different types of disordered thoughts and behaviors. The types of blame providers use morph throughout treatment to match the current symptoms but inevitably point back to personal failure as the cause of the disorder itself and the reason for any obstacle towards getting better.

A person with an eating disorder is blamed for being vain to want to be thin, even though our entire culture focuses on weight and thinness; blamed for having thoughts to restrict or believe they are fat even though these experiences are practically universal; blamed for debating controversial topics around body in session even though that type of discussion is integral part of any therapy; blamed for not being able to eat a full meal plan or avoid behaviors even though that’s exactly why they are seeking help in the first place, and blamed for almost every other part of their illness and treatment.

The blame that starts with idealizing the unattainable goal of perfect thinness expands to all aspects of an eating disorder so that the illness itself becomes a reservoir of endless blame and often self-hatred.

It’s clear to me that openness in treatment towards understanding the person seeking help is necessary to understand the nature of their eating disorder and also the torment of being endlessly ignored and misunderstood. Treatment needs to involve the psychological wellness of the person in a kind, generous and caring way. Without that step, any chance at improvement is impossible.

Many people without this support talk about being labeled chronic which is intended to instill more blame and hopelessness, but how often does this label only reflect inadequate and uncaring treatment?

Blame does not belong in eating disorder treatment any more than it does in any psychiatric treatment. People with eating disorders ended up in their illness, like anyone else, without intention, and they need help. Our society has both increased the incidence of these disorders through a culture of chronic dieting and then coined a label to isolate a swath of our population and saddle them with an illness without much of a path to recovery.

Every person with an eating disorder has their own experience that led them to be sick, to their trials of treatment and to a course of healing. There is no place for blame but only for understanding, help and the hope that they can live they want to live.

The Three False Beliefs in Eating Disorder Treatment

The last few posts outlined my thoughts about how and why the eating disorder epidemic remains so strong and influential over decades. Social forces use psychiatric labels to systematically reinforce these illnesses to disenfranchise an entire group of people.

Theories are one thing, but the more important question for a clinician is what to do with these concepts.

There are several ways the eating disorder treatment community reinforces these beliefs and allows clinical acumen to support the sexism and bias inherent in these illnesses.

I’ll flesh out my thoughts about the three most important problems inherent in eating disorder treatment in the subsequent posts but will outline them here.

The underlying factor uniting these three is the lack of compassion, understanding and care at the center of these supposed clinical interventions. If mental health treatment is supposed to start from a place of openness and kindness, how can it be that the central tenets of eating disorder treatment ignore this sentiment completely?

The idealization of thinness implies for all people that thinness is within your grasp, a goal attainable with the right amount of will and perseverance. If you don’t reach the goal, then it is your fault. Eating disorder treatment adheres to this misguided belief by positing that eating disorders are also your fault. If you don’t get better, then you haven’t tried hard enough. Although psychiatric illness is considered largely biological, mental health providers don’t seem to talk about blame for illnesses other than for eating disorders.

Similarly, treatment programs run by finance companies, as I have discussed extensively in recent posts, use not only blame but the supposed utopia of “full recovery” as the holy grail to shame recalcitrant patients into submission. Without much guidance about how to get to full recovery, nor even a realistic sense of what that means, treatment program philosophy uses this nonsensical term to instill a sense of failure and blame in all patients when they don’t rescue the impossible.

The result of the false belief is that social media and outpatient treatment revolve around a concept far afield from what getting better from an eating disorder actually looks like.

The end result of blame is the extensive use of ultimatums in eating disorder treatment. When clinicians decide a patient is getting “too sick” or “not trying hard enough,” it is considered standard of care to make an ultimatum: get better, go into treatment or otherwise you can’t stay in therapy anymore. It’s unfathomable to me that people consider this step caring and ethical when the goal of care is to help people get better. How can clinicians sleep at night when they overtly blame their patients for not getting better?

I’ll talk more about these three issues—blame, “full recovery” and ultimatums—in the coming posts. Making changes to eating disorder treatment can transform a field guided by nefarious social forces and instead focus recovery on true healing from a physical, psychological and personal place.