If you or someone close to you is struggling to eat correctly or maintain a healthy weight, it might be time to consider the best treatment for eating disorders. Eating disorders can affect anyone regardless of age, gender, race, or other characteristics.
If you don’t learn how to treat an eating disorder, it could have long-term severe psychological and medical impacts. Contact Satori Health today to learn more about our outpatient mental health treatment in Los Angeles.
What is an Eating Disorder?
An eating disorder is a complex mental health disorder. Someone struggling with an eating disorder can put themselves at serious risk for psychological and physical health problems if they don’t learn how to treat an eating disorder. Some examples include:
- Bulimia nervosa
- Avoidant food intake disorder
- Anorexia nervosa
- Binge eating disorder
Eating disorders are often characterized by disturbing attitudes toward food, body weight, and eating, which manifests in harmful behaviors related to food and eating.
What Causes Eating Disorders?
The best treatment for eating disorders will vary based on the cause. There is no single cause for an eating disorder. Eating disorders often result from multiple factors like your mental health, environment, and genetics.
Genetics
Sometimes eating disorders manifest across multiple generations within the same family. So, if your parents or grandparents were diagnosed with an eating disorder, you might be at a higher risk for developing an eating disorder yourself.
Culture
Culture plays a detrimental role in the development of eating disorders, especially in younger individuals. Unrealistic and artificially enhanced photos lead to incorrect views of what qualifies as beautiful or normal. Social media pushing thin body types doesn’t help. This is especially harmful to young teenagers who don’t have the coping skills to process all of these cultural aspects healthily.
Environment
Environment matters. The environment in which you grow up or currently live can cause the development of an eating disorder. Being pressured by your family, culture, or friends to look a certain way, having to contend with strict performance requirements for athletic pursuits, challenging family dynamics, or even a history of trauma can lead to the development of an eating disorder.
Mental Health
Your mental health at any given point can contribute to an eating disorder. Undergoing stressful situations like moving, divorce or death in the family, or going away to college, can increase your risk, especially if you don’t have other coping mechanisms to handle your stress.
People who struggle with anxiety disorders, high sensitivity or low distress tolerance, and perfectionism are at a higher risk of developing eating disorders.
What is the Best Treatment for Eating Disorders?
The best treatment for eating disorders usually includes a combination of therapy, nutritional education and monitoring, and even medication. But there might be a need to treat serious health problems resulting from an eating disorder or another mental health disorder that you are struggling with simultaneously. Figuring out how to treat an eating disorder is something our team of specialists at Satori Health can help you with.
Therapy
Therapeutic treatments for eating disorder situations might last anywhere between a few months and a few years. Your treatment could involve a combination of different therapies like:
- Cognitive behavioral therapy is where you get a chance to focus on the thought patterns, emotions, and actions related to the eating disorder. Learning how to integrate healthy eating behaviors takes place simultaneously with learning how to change the distorted thoughts you might have which contributed to that disorder in the first place.
- Family-based therapy might be an essential part of your recovery. Family therapy can involve those close to you as they help you restore healthy eating patterns and maintain a healthy weight during recovery.
No matter the type of therapy you undergo or the types of group and individual treatment to add to your program, the purpose remains the same: to help you replace unhealthy habits with healthy ones, monitor your mood and your eating, normalize your eating patterns, achieve a healthy weight, and figure out how you can deal with stressful situations in a more proactive fashion.
Nutrition Education and Monitoring
Offering information on proper nutrition and helping you to understand better what healthy eating habits are is an essential part of your recovery. Not only do you need information on healthier eating habits and standards of beauty, but in some cases, you might require ongoing monitoring to see how effective that education has proven and what else can be done to help you succeed.
Medication
Depending on the severity of your symptoms, medication might be an essential part of your recovery. Medication or partial hospitalization are usually prescribed when you have struggled with an eating disorder long-term, and your body is suffering from severe physical ramifications.
How to Find Eating Disorder Treatments in Southern California
If you are ready for treatments for eating disorder problems, let Satori Health lend a hand. Our mental health treatment center in the San Fernando Valley offers comprehensive outpatient mental health programs. We provide individualized mental health treatment in Los Angeles and the Southern California area. When you speak with our admissions staff, we will help you figure out the best combination of therapies and treatment for your situation.
Reach out to Satori Health to find the best treatment for eating disorders.