Episode 25 Holistic Treatment of Eating Disorders with Rebecca Capps

The Holistic Counseling Podcast

What are some holistic strategies that can treat eating disorders? How do mindfulness and breathwork come together to strengthen the benefits of intuitive eating? Can you bring aromatherapy principles into eating disorder treatment?

MEET REBECCA CAPPS

Rebecca Capps is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist committed to helping clients feel good about their body and happy in life—without food guilt or dieting. She named her practice Mind-Body Thrive because she takes a holistic approach and believes that in order to thrive, one must consider both the mind and body. Rebecca lives near the beach in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband and 1-year-old son, Rowan.

Visit her website. Connect on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

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IN THIS PODCAST:

• Intuitive eating as a treatment for eating disorders
• Mindfulness and breathwork for eating
• Benefits of aromatherapy

INTUITIVE EATING AS A TREATMENT FOR EATING DISORDERS

It’s ironic, like, just giving yourself unconditional permission to eat because when we say: “I can’t have the brownies”, well obviously we’re going to think about the brownies until the cows come home. Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat and to honor your taste preferences and to notice how they play into your satisfaction. (Rebecca Capps)

Intuitive eating is a powerful tool that people who have suffered from eating disorders before can use to overcome the intense restriction that they feel over their food and their body.

After a long period of time stuck in an eating disorder, people become detached from their hunger cues and can no longer identify – or trust – their body when it is telling them what they need.

In this instance, intuitive eating is listening to what your body wants and learning to honor those cravings until the intensity wears off and you begin to seek out nutritious food instead of the food that you used to restrict from. In this, mindfulness is necessary.

[Intuitive eating] is a way to reject the diet mentality and to get angry a culture that has … fed us this myth that we need to always control and listen to “health gurus” and “fitness influencers” instead of tuning into our own body’s own natural, inherent wisdom, because the truth is that the body is inherently healing, it wants to heal itself and its actually the mind that keeps us stuck. (Rebecca Capps)

Intuitive eating helps people to get out of a cerebral realm and focus their attention on what their body is asking for, instead of what they think it should be asking for.

MINDFULNESS AND BREATHWORK FOR EATING

Mindfulness is an integral part of intuitive eating. You can combine mindfulness and basic breathwork to ground the body away from stress, out of past trauma or memory, and into the present moment.

From this place of presence, awareness, and a sense of calm, once you have removed yourself out of yesterday’s stressful emotions or this morning’s difficult situation, you can connect to what it is that your body needs instead of eating what your emotions feel like eating.

Breathing often mirrors our internal emotional state and truly those who suffer from mental disorders, specifically anorexia and bulimia, we need that kind of grounding to ground down and be in the moment so that we can tune into our hunger cues. (Rebecca Capps)

BENEFITS OF AROMATHERAPY

It is possible to use aromatherapy as a paired healing modality to treat eating disorders alongside doing breathwork. Different oils instill different beneficial feelings in patients, such as:

• Geranium: instills self-trust,
• Rose: opens the heart chakra,
• Patchouli: helps with self-confidence,
• Bergamot: calms a person from anxiety and stress.

Consider having a multi-disciplinary treatment plan, so that you are aware of how you can use different modalities and how they work together, instead of focusing only on one.

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Resources Mentioned And Useful Links:

• The Power of Sound Healing with Jade Perry
• Practice of the Practice Podcast Network