Working on the brain can help with eating problems....

I was flipping through the TV channels last night and caught a few minutes of Dr. Daniel Amen's Change Your Brain, Change Your Body on PBS. I caught very little of his talk, but I did happen to catch a great line. Dr. Amen saids something like, “...we need to work on the organ between our ears...not the stomach when trying to lose weight...”. I couldn't agree more with this! After all our brain controls hunger/fullness cues, impulses, maintains unhealthy habits around food, how we talk to ourselves about food and weight, etc.
“Working on the brain” holds true for recovering from an eating disorder, too. Whether I am working with a client that wants to lose weight or recover from an eating disorder, most often we talk about behaviors, thoughts and feelings about food, rather than food itself. So often food “problems” are not about the food, but something else!