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Reclaiming Yourself from Binge Eating: A Step-By-Step Guide to Healing An Interview with Leora Fulvio, MFT By Nancy Eichhorn, PhD "It started with bread." That simple sentence begins an in-depth, complex look at binge eating disorder—its etiology and its treatment. Leora Fulvio, MFT offers an extensive mind-body-spirit guidebook that utilizes mindfulness and self-acceptance to help readers witness their own dysfunctional relationships with food and come to a healthier place of self-love and healing on every level. Fulvio openly discusses her younger self, her foray into self-denial, her will to replace hunger with wine and diets, with exercise and starvation, with self-control and discipline, all the while losing out to hunger and selfloathing. Obsessing about food and her body prevented her from living her life, she says. And from this place of craving and self-sabotage, Fulvio realized that she was “losing the battle between a healthy mind and body and a horrible eating disorder—sick body and sick mind” (p. 3). “I have been working with women and food and body image issues since 1999,” Fulvio says. “I was a hypnotherapist working with women dealing with overeating issues, and I realized that it was more than a bad habit. I had my own eating issues, but I hadn’t gone into depth with my own recovery. It became a parallel process as I worked through my own issues and with these women. I felt I needed to go a lot deeper in my own process and with my own therapy in graduate school to become a licensed therapist, which is what I did." Working with women experiencing “hard core eating disorders” (binge eating, bulimia, anorexia), Fulvio began a blog in 2007. Her intention stemmed from her work with clients and from her experience with online sites supposedly offering help to women with binge eating disorder yet were in truth “preying on people” (e.g., the diet industry, liposuction, laser fat removal). Fulvio heard women saying, "I’m sitting here completely alone, and I'm starting to binge, and I can’t stop, I feel totally powerless against food, and then after I binge, I just hate myself, and I want to die. Can someone help me?” So she started an advice blog to let people know they were not alone, that there are others out there dealing with binge eating disorder. “Therapy is expensive and not everyone can afford it; yet, they need to find help,” says Fulvio. “I was getting lots of questions on the blog so I started my Question and answer Fridays. All the while, I was writing things down on the side. I wanted to put all the questions and all the Somatic Psychotherapy Today | Fall 2014 | Volume 4 Number 2 | page 52
information together in one succinct place; the idea of a book took on a life of its own. At first it was going to be 7 Steps to Binge Eating Treatment—based on all those 7 step books out here. But as I was writing the steps, I realized there were way more than 7 steps. It’s a complicated disorder. So I thought I would just include everything here (there are 34 steps in the book). I wrote with the 12 -step model philosophy in mind— take what you need and leave the rest behind. “I wrote every day, and before I started writing, I said a little prayer. It helped my Ego, my inner critic, that judge who was saying, ‘Who are you to be an authority? How are you an authority on this subject?’ I decided, well I’m not an authority, but I am empathetic, and I want to help other people, and that’s all you have to do. I asked the Universe to write through me. I felt that if I could be a vessel for the information, then that's all I had to do, just be open and write. If I could do that, then maybe I could leave my ego behind and let the voice come through me. This endeavor wasn't about me or my ego, this was all about helping people. That is how I go about working with my clients in individual sessions and that is the way I chose to work on the book. My intention was to be open, aware, allow myself to follow direction, almost like following a trail of breadcrumbs left for me. I did my best to be open in my writing and sharing. “It was difficult to write about my own experience. Here I am the therapist, I’m supposed to be a blank slate, and it’s all about the client, but as a writer that’s not going to fly. People are not going to identify with the book if they feel talked down to rather than felt with. As a writer, there has to be some transparency in order for people to feel heard and seen. I wanted my readers to feel as if I was there in the room with them, that I was going to hold their hand and say, ‘Look I’ve been there; I know it’s painful and I know it’s hard, but we can do this together, we can recover...’ That was my intention.” The book is divided into two sections. The first helps readers understand binge eating disorder while the second offers steps—action steps and internal steps—to change actual eating behaviors as well as internalized thoughts and feelings associated with food and with the self. One of the first steps is to give up dieting. Fulvio suggests trying it for one day, then a week. “Dieting is something people cling to as a support, as a self-object really,” Fulvio says. Another step deals with the inner critic— identifying the critic that is telling you that something is wrong with you, that you need to change. This voice says things like ‘you are bad if you binge eat’ creating a vicious cycle. Here’s this voice telling you that because you binge eat you’re bad and you believe it. And then self-hatred comes. To cope with this emotional onslaught, you binge again. Fulvio suggests you approach the concept of judgment and criticism by looking at how you judge and criticize others, first. She also helps readers establish healthy boundaries. “Life is a lot easier with boundaries,” she says. “When you recover from an eating disorder, you go from either having rigid boundaries or no boundaries. I teach people how to have loving, helpful, adult boundaries and then how to teach these boundaries to their inner self, their inner child. “People will resonate with different techniques, different ways into their healing and recovery. I saw a need for this book because I have read a lot, I don’t want to say I’ve read every book out there on binge eating, but I have read a lot of them. There is so much work out there,” Fulvio says. She reflects on writers such as Geneen Roth (author of When Food is Love) and Christopher Fairburn (author of Overcoming Binge Eating). “I wanted to interweave their work and offer tangible steps you can take and make happen. I felt the cognitive behavioral stuff was a little dry in my own recovery; yet, I resonated with the tangible need for some assignments to try to put it all together.” Fulvio explained that there is a misperception that women with binge eating disorder are all overweight. The majority of the people she works with are at a normal weight, she says. “I’ve even had people down right skinny with binge eating disorder. Somatic Psychotherapy Today | Fall 2014 | Volume 4 Number 2 | page 53
Page 1 and 2: Fall 2014 Somatic Volume 4 Number 2
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