Dear Susie Orbach, I´m launching my book: “And Were They Thin and Happy Ever After? The Ways Out of Compulsive Eating”. Everything started in 1988. I was on vacation, at the beach, with another diet going wrong, when I found a book with a weird name: “Fat is a Feminist Issue”. When I read it, important issues of my life got …
Think about experiencing within yourself a safe place of our own, where no one else can enter. In this place, you just be yourself, no need to do anything, to produce, to match any expectations. A clear, comfortable, objective, stable place. It can be real or imaginary, or a mixture of the two. One of many techniques for this …
Sometimes, in the search for quick fixes for our compulsive eating, we end up finding paths that eventually control our symptoms but do not deal with the causes. We realize that we just exchanged a compulsion by another, like shopping, compulsively working, drinking, drugs, cutting, promiscuous sex. We live in a society that imposes upon us a compulsive lifestyle …
Some years ago I participated in a workshop at the Women´s Therapy Center Institute of Nova York, leaded by my friends and mentors Jane Hirschmann e Carol Munter. They are the authors of Overcoming Overeating, which I had the privilege of writing the preface for the Brazilian edition. We were discussing the generalized feeling of discomfort with our bodies in …
My niece is a such a beautiful girl that she was invited to work as a fashion model. Even so, she could not escape from the pressure on thinness. I remember the scene at the pool. She was teaching me how to seat at the border with the bath outlet (Brazilian “canga), taking it off while sliding into the water …
Nowadays in Brazil we think that exposing our bodies is quite natural and even something we are obliged to, specially if we are in good shape. Children, adolescents, brides, mothers, women of age are all in the same boat. I see in my work that people submit themselves to fashion rules, even when not at ease with being scrutinized and …
People ask if to stop dieting because they don´t work and choosing self acceptance means obesity. “There is a safe way to loose weight?” Of course yes, if you feel your weight does not represent you. But we can´t weight whatever we want. And there is a price for everything. In my work there is a path of self knowledge …
When I was little, things were not disposable, so my mother taught me the art of darning. She said that it served to fine and delicate fabrics. Today, as a psychotherapist, I think a lot of this art. Even the happiest marriages, are made of a fine and delicate fabric, which can spread or tear easily. Despite this, we …
My considerations about the Brazilian event, in the auditorium of one of the biggest Brazilian newspaper, “Folha de São Paulo”: Different and interesting points of view, shared by an endocrinologist, a nutritionist, a psychoanalyst who works with a non-diet approach to Eating Disorders and a psychoanalyst who specializes in body issues in contemporary times. The meeting set up a …
The ways out of compulsive eating Compulsive eating is like a dark night in a rough sea of waves that lead us to many directions. Immersed in this suffering, we may feel inclined to do a diet of proteins, or one that indicate increasing complex carbohydrates, or taking supplements that at first sight will make all the difference, or greatly …
