If you or someone close to you is struggling with an eating disorder like anorexia, it is important to find appropriate anorexia recovery programs that involves things like nutritional education and therapy.
What is Anorexia?
Anorexia is one of several major eating disorders where individuals go through cycles to restrict calorie intake. It is not uncommon for someone with anorexia to also utilize binging and purging behaviors to compensate if they fail at their perceived restriction amounts. Binging and purging behaviors can include things like:
- The use of laxatives
- Self-induced vomiting
- Excessive exercise
How Anorexia Recovery Works
With an anorexia recovery plan, those who struggle with an eating disorder like anorexia have two primary goals:
Change Eating Behaviors
The first is to change that harmful cycle and to disrupt the pattern of cyclical malnourishment, calorie restriction, binging, and purging.
Changing eating behaviors takes a lot of work with trained therapists who can help individuals do things like:
- Change their understanding of nutrition and food
- Change their view of their body
- Learn to love themselves at any size
- Learn to be grateful for what their body does when properly fed
Changing eating behaviors takes time and is a highly personalized process based on individual anorexia history, symptoms, and severity.
Improve Nutrition
The second part of anorexia recovery is to improve overall nutrition and support healthy, sustainable weight gain.
This weight gain is something that needs to be monitored by a team of professionals, particularly nutritional specialists, who can provide education on healthy and well-balanced diets and who understand caloric intake.
Those who struggle with anorexia are often underweight, and in some cases, the severity of this might require initial hospitalization with a weight management program monitored by doctors until stabilization can be achieved. Beyond that, individuals work with a team to learn educational information on nutrition to help them better understand the purpose of their nutrition changes and to support the changes to thought processes that might have contributed to anorexia in the first place.
Professionals will help determine the key parts of an anorexia recovery plan for each client to ensure they can help them achieve a sustainable, healthy relationship with nutrition.
How Long Does Anorexia Recovery Take
Anorexia recovery is a somewhat lengthy process for many people, as it takes time to change those patterns of thought and behavior. When you reach out to a team for eating disorder treatment, they will conduct an initial assessment to determine the severity of your symptoms and whether you need initial hospitalization for safety.
Most people benefit from an inpatient residential program where they can reside full-time at a treatment center while undergoing their initial plan.
Finding Anorexia Recovery
At Casa Serena, we provide a women-only treatment center that specializes in a women’s eating disorder program. We are just minutes from the beach, operating a luxury treatment facility for the community where clients can work together toward common goals and gain access to local resources to help with long-term recovery from anorexia and other eating disorders.
We provide residential, outpatient, and sober living levels of care with a wide range of therapies for eating disorder treatment that can include holistic programs such as mind-body balance programs, discovering wellness programs, and garden therapy.
For over 65 years, we have helped build a foundation for safety, healing, growth, and peer support. As a trauma-informed organization, we will ensure your triggers are avoided so that you might better understand the impact that trauma has had on your behaviors, including eating-related behaviors.
Overall, anorexia recovery treatment takes skilled professionals with a combination of nutritional management and therapy to be most effective. At our facility, we provide a women’s-only center that specializes in anorexia treatment for women by women.
Contact us today to learn more by calling (866) 590-8601.