Binge Eating Disorder Treatment in Utah

Binge eating disorder (BED) involves episodes of eating large amounts of food while feeling out of control or disconnected. It’s not about lack of willpower but it’s a response to emotional pain, restriction, or stress.
Therapy helps you understand the why behind the behavior and build a healthier, more compassionate relationship with food and your body.

Binge Eating Disorder is the most common eating disorder. It’s more than occasional overeating. It often looks like:

• Eating large amounts of food secretly in a relatively short period of time

• Feeling a lack of control around food 

• Embarrassment about how you are eating 

• Feelings of embarrassment and guilt after eating episodes

• Eating large amounts of food when you don’t feel hungry

• Rapidly and quickly eating large amounts of food

Binging eating is treated individually depending on your needs. Some people need the support of a dietitian along with a binge eating disorder therapist to help them improve their relationship with food. I recommend all of my clients read the book “Intuitive Eating” and consider learning to be more in touch and in tune with their own bodies. Therapy sessions focus on understanding your history with binging and where it started. Truthfully I don’t talk with my clients a ton about their binging behaviors but more so focus on understanding your emotions, developing skills to cope, and being able to heal from the experiences that may have led you to trust food more than you trust yourself.

There is no easy way to answer this, and it’s not that simple. Many of the women I work with learned to binge eat as a way of taking care of themselves because that’s the only way they knew how. They learned to binge because it helped them get through painful emotions when they didn’t have anyone else they could turn to. Binge eating could have been modeled to you by someone you were close to and you learned to use it as a way of coping. Sometimes the women I have worked with have had undiagnosed ADHD and learned to binge for a hit of dopamine and didn’t realize this was why.

Yes, there has been a researched link between ADHD and binge eating. It doesn’t mean that everyone who has ADHD binge eats, and it doesn’t mean that if you binge you automatically have ADHD. A symptom of ADHD is struggling with controlling impulses and being able to cope with strong emotions, which might lead to binge eating more often than those who don’t have ADHD. Having ADHD also means struggling with dopamine levels, which brings pleasure and reward. As a way of getting more of a dopamine hit, people with ADHD might binge eat. It’s important to get proper testing by a trained professional to find out if you meet the criteria for ADHD. Tiktok doesn’t count :).

Overeating and binging might seem similar, but they're a bit different. Overeating is eating past your fullness levels at a particular time. Maybe it’s having a bigger portion than usual during a meal and being more full than usual. Binging, on the other hand, is when you eat a lot of food very quickly, in secret, and often it feels like you can't control it. Binging also happens in a short period of time. So, while both involve eating more food, binging usually feels more intense.

There may be a few reasons why you are prone to binge at night. A common theme I see with the women I work with is that nighttime is the time when they can be alone. When they binge they don’t want to be judged by other people and feel so much shame about what they do that they wait until everyone else has gone to bed. Another reason why people binge late at night is because they’ve tried to restrict food all day. Maybe because they binged the night before and are trying hard to compensate for it by not eating. This leads to being overly hungry which makes you more vulnerable to binge. The biggest predictor of a binge is restriction.

In therapy, we’ll work together to:

• Understand why you turn to food as a way to cope

• Break free from dieting and restriction that fuel the binge cycle

• Learn new ways to handle stress, emotions, and shame

• Heal body image concerns in a world that pressures women to look a certain way>body image therapy in Utah

• Build self-compassion so you can stop feeling like a failure

I’m not here to tell you to lose weight or demand you change your body. I’m here to help you do the deeper work to uncover what binge eating is really about, without making you feel worse about yourself. f you’re ready to feel more at peace around food and yourself, I’d love to help.

Yes. Research shows that online therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy for treating binge eating disorder.
Many women even prefer online sessions because they can talk openly in the comfort and privacy of their own home. I serve women all over the state of Utah including Salt Lake City, Logan, Provo, Heber City, St. George, Cedar City and all rural areas in between.