A huge number of people come for guidance for weight change. Frustrated individuals go everywhere, to slimming clubs, bootcamps, to learn why they cannot succeed at weight loss, in the expectation that if they find the reasons for their “lack of willpower”, they will emerge sylphlike from the therapy room with their relationship with food corrected. These clients hope and are led to believe by unspecialised therapists, that they will find an explanation for their failure to lose weight in their childhood adversity, their poor attachment experiences or other traumas. Some clients even think tha ..read more

A PASSIONATE MILITANT SAYS NO I hear on the grapevine that someone has taken exception to NCFEDs method for assessing a client’s story via a lifeline. The lifeline tracks their life experiences alongside changes to their eating and body size or weight with colours and pictures. Someone claiming to be a psychotherapist has taken exception to our understanding the client’s weight changes during their lifespan (alongside their story) by calling this “fat phobic” The apparent purpose of tracking a client’s weight, is not to shame or judge them. It is to see how life experiences and transitions hav ..read more

Do you want to be happy or do you want to maintain a low BMI. Do you want to be happy and have big muscles and low body fat?  Do you want to be happy but only if you are running 50 miles a week? Cannot have both. A colleague had a session with a person with entrenched anorexia who said that she was coming to therapy because she just wanted to be happy. We all want to be happy, but what does this mean? I was thinking about my own life (trigger alert) and it is not without stress. I have some inconvenient and slightly painful health issues, I always worry about my children, my work carries ..read more

And its link to eating disorders by Jenny Tomei What is leaky gut? Our gut lining is made up of a barrier of tight junctions, like little doors that open and close to control what gets into our bloodstream. It allows the passage of the good guys (for instance, nutrients to feed your body) and keeps out the bad guys (disease-causing nasties, or pathogens and toxins such as lipopolysaccharides, produced by certain bacteria). The gut is the body’s first line of defence. It’s the reason we’re not all bedridden and defeated by infection every time we eat or step outside. Sometimes these tight junct ..read more

Not all Emotional Eating is Emotional “Food understands me” says one of my clients in a larger body. I am taken slightly aback. She has been struggling to explain why she continues to eat when she is full and why she cannot stop eating her treats. Like millions of people struggling with their weight Ms S is not impressed by the body positivity movement, and even after trying multiple diets she continues to wish that there was something that will help her lose weight and keep it off. She is pre diabetic and she wants to live a healthy life to see her grandkids grow up. She calls herself an emot ..read more

Hadley Freeman has written a searing account of her anorexia and her change in the Sunday Times. I don’t use the word “Recovery” because this word doesn’t quite capture what for many of us was not “getting better” but making different decisions about how we want to live. Me too. So, the anorexia isn’t something that goes away, it’s unhelpful to talk about “recovery” in the same way as we talk about recovery from measles.  it is a part of us, we have too many memories of it and sometimes it tries to persuade us that we will be happier if we embrace it. But we know it is a lie. So when rece ..read more

COACHES CAN The Guardian article regarding the suitability of coaches for working with eating disorder persons has raised a lot of angst. Out of the woodwork pour well-meaning academics, authors and persons with lived experience who regard themselves as the mouthpiece for eating disorder sufferers.  The Guardian journalist had a clear agenda for her article, and for her Editors, this was to “awfulize” the phenomenon of “untrained” coaches working with eating disorders. She targeted NCFED because we refer people to professional coaches – and nutritionists without qualifications in psycholo ..read more

Ozempic and risk of thyroid and pancreatic cancer? Reproduced from an article on Medscape March 2023 Ozempic works by affecting expression of GLP1 – a pancreatic hormone that boosts the effects of insulin, slows gastric emptying, and affects some of the appetite increasing chemicals in the brain. The weight loss effects of Ozempic are impressive, so long as people keep injecting. A few years ago, alongside American (FDA) approval of GLP-1 agonists, a warning accompanied the products’ labels to not use this class of medications in patients with medullary thyroid cancer, a family history of med ..read more

Weight loss, tricks, keto diets and calorie nonsense Today I heard on the radio that eating a handful of nuts daily is associated with longevity, short term weight loss and long term weight control. Really!  All that fat!  All those calories! And yes, ‘tis true. When we eat processed food, we circumvent the natural satiety mechanisms that start with the gut. When we eat, our gastric fundus and intestinal stretch receptors start the process that informs the hypothalamus about food intake. The hypothalamus is crucial for weight control, it is where “set weight” is located. That is what ..read more

Does ADHD AhDD up? Dominic Lawson writes in the Times that we may be too willing to create for ourselves an “illness identity”. A gaggle of celebrities have come out to claim that they have ADHD and I see many people in the counselling professions “come out” as neurodiverse, because they fit some of the symptoms. If symptoms are a marker of neurodiversity, then half the population would join the club of fidgeters, daydreamers, sensitives, people prone to careless mistakes, nerds, people who are clumsy ; people who just don’t like piped music in restaurants, and people who are overwhelmed when ..read more