Are you eating more than you should? Trying to undo the effects by a constant cycle of dieting? Perpetually anxious about your weight, shape and size? Many of us know that our food choices are not healthy, but we find it difficult to improve our eating behaviour. This ongoing ‘battle with food’ is almost inevitable, living as we do in a society where we have instant and tempting access to much more food than we really need.
If the way you use food bothers you, then Julia Buckroyd’s Understanding Your Eating (Open University Press, September 2011, £14.99) may be for you. The book is aimed at anyone who feels their eating behaviour is beyond their control. ‘I really want people to feel that they have a right to be upset about their worries about food, weight, shape and size, even if no one has given them an official diagnosis’, Julia says, ‘what is important is that you are uneasy about the way you use food’.
Julia uses the term disordered eating rather than eating disorders. Eating disorders refer to specific behaviours that are common to a very small proportion of the population, which meet international standards of diagnosis. In the UK these standards are set, Julia says, as a way of rationing help. If you are restricting your food intake, bingeing and purging, or simple consistently overeating, but you don’t fulfil the weight criteria or exact prescription of the diagnoses, you won’t be classified as having an eating disorder and may find it difficult to get support. But that is not to say that you aren’t distressed and miserable about food.
Julia believes that, however your problems with food manifest, the key to overcoming those difficulties is in understanding the emotional reasons behind your eating. The research that underpins Understanding Your Eating suggests disordered eating usually results when our early experiences have not prepared us adequately to deal with life’s difficulties, and we therefore find ourselves using food as a means of emotional regulation. The root causes of difficulties may be very similar, regardless of whether we deal with them by over- or under-eating. There is an overload of information on specific diets, techniques and approaches to change our eating behaviour now, but ‘first of all’, says Julia, ‘it is crucial to make sense of our attitudes to food, so that the changes we make will be easier to maintain in the long term.’
Understanding Your Eating aims to help readers:
• be more aware of their feelings towards food
• understand the way they talk to themselves and how that pushes them to manipulate food
• explore their reasons for their challenges with food using the questions and exercises throughout the book
• find another way of managing their day-to-day experience
• work towards ways of needing to manipulate food less and being able to take care of themselves better
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Julia Buckroyd has been working in the field of eating disorders since 1984, from her first position as counsellor at London Contemporary Dance School, to her most recent as the Director of the Obesity and Eating Disorders Research Unit at Hertfordshire University. She currently runs an obesity service for the NHS and supervises counsellors working in this field. She has developed a programme called "Understanding your Eating" and runs a national network of workshops and seminars in this area.
Understanding Your Eating by Julia Buckroyd is published by Open University Press in paperback, September 2011, £14.99, 9780335241972. For advance copies, an interview with the author or any further information please contact Verity Holliday, McGraw-Hill, Shoppenhangers Road, Maidenhead, SL6 2QL Tel: 01628502595 Mob: 07795060680 E: |
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