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Why Service Matters: Eating Disorder Sufferers Heal by Giving Back

By Meghan Vivo

Giving back to others in need can be an emotionally and spiritually fulfilling experience for anyone. But volunteerism has proven especially therapeutic for men and women recovering from eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, who often struggle with a lack of self-worth and feelings of disconnectedness.

Self-Confidence and a Sense of Purpose

Community service is an esteem-boosting pastime. On its website, the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) lists the basic principles for preventing an eating disorder. NEDA warns that prevention efforts fail if they concentrate solely on warning the public about the signs, symptoms, and dangers of eating disorders. Instead, the organization advises, effective prevention programs must also address our cultural obsession with thinness, the roles of men and women in our society, and the need to develop “self-esteem and self-respect in a variety of areas (school, work, community service, hobbies) that transcend physical appearance.”

Taking the focus off oneself and placing it on others can help eating disorder sufferers look beyond themselves for answers. Eating Disorders Anonymous (EDA), for example, asks participants to carry the message of strength, hope, and recovery to others as a means of giving back and solidifying one’s own recovery effort.

Turning the Negative into a Positive

As an added benefit, lending a hand to someone in need simply feels good. The medical and wellness information service, WebMD, lists stress management as an essential component of eating disorder recovery. In addition to mindfulness activities, yoga, and breathing exercises, the site advises that “Volunteer work or work that helps others can be a powerful stress-buster.”

Community service projects also help eating disorder sufferers develop new, healthy interests and hobbies and break away from eating disorder patterns. With each project completed and life touched, individuals experience improvements in self-perception and their ability to positively impact the world.

Forging Connections

The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), an inventory for personality traits such as novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, persistence, self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence, indicates that as connectedness increases, eating disorder symptoms decrease. This means that eating disorder sufferers experience greater relief from eating disorder symptoms when they feel connected to the world around them.

Volunteer activities and community service projects teach eating disorder sufferers that part of recovery is connecting with self, family, community, and environment, explains Stacie McEntyre, MSW, LCSW, CEDS, the executive director of Carolina House, a residential treatment center for women suffering with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorders, and related issues.

“Eating disorders are, in many ways, egocentric, self-perpetuating diseases. Combined with solid multi-disciplinary treatment, service to others allows eating disorders patients to recognize that they are part of a greater whole, and are better able to find a purpose in sustaining connections, a hallmark of recovery according to the TCI,” says McEntyre.

As the Eating Disorders Anonymous website explains, “Recovery means developing healthy perspectives, knowing we will do better some days than others, knowing we will never be perfect at anything including recovery, and knowing recovery is not freedom from trouble and pain but freedom from getting stuck in feelings of uselessness and self-pity.”

At Work in the Community

At Carolina House, eating disorder patients work to connect with themselves, family, and loved ones through intensive therapy, mindfulness exercises, and holistic activities like yoga, body movement therapy, meditation, and creativity groups. The program’s clinical director, Chase Bannister, MSW, MDiv, LCSW,who has earned a master’s degree in social work from UNC-Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in divinity from Duke University, also helps patients connect with their spirituality.

Bannister leads spirituality groups at Carolina House to help patients understand the role of spirituality in their lives, especially as it relates to their emotional and behavioral well-being. Whatever an individual’s belief system, these sessions encourage residents to connect with a spiritual support system in the community during and after treatment, if desired, and integrate the individual’s beliefs with their eating disorder treatment. In a group setting, the residents learn to use their faith to help heal, rather than maintain, their eating disordered patterns.

On a larger scale, the residents at Carolina House connect with the community through supervised group outings and volunteer work, such as making homemade meals for families at Ronald McDonald House. Working in concert with a local rescue mission, the patients also help tend to a local garden that feeds underprivileged families. By choosing community service projects that relate directly to the struggles of many eating disorder patients, such as tasks that require them to be around food or use food to nourish those in need, the women further their recovery on multiple levels.

The eating disorder treatment program at Carolina House also encourages residents to consider their relationship with the environment. The program’s full-time chef guides patients through the process of composting, gardening, and buying local produce from a farmers’ market, which helps them not only understand their impact on the world around them but also appreciate the natural source of their food. Working with food, seeing how it is grown, and watching it nourish the body and the environment helps eating disorder sufferers develop a healthy relationship with food.

Giving back to others is fulfilling on many levels. In serving the community, eating disorder sufferers help those in need while simultaneously healing themselves. Of course, community service is just one component of an effective eating disorder treatment program. Well-rounded treatment, like that offered at Carolina House, also incorporates intensive therapy, psychiatric and medical care, nutrition and culinary therapy, best-practice treatment protocols, and aftercare. For more information about eating disorder treatment, contact Carolina House at (866) 960-7240 or visit www.carolinaeatingdisorders.com.