ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by exploring the social, psychic, and embodied causes of eating problems as well as key issues that arise during treatment. First, the author argues that diets, and especially the diet mentality, contribute to eating problems, including obesity, even as they create huge profits for corporations. Second, she documents the ways in which beauty and style corporations negatively affect women’s ability to think and live in their bodies. Third, the impact of agribusiness on eating problems is explored. Ultimately, it is suggested that these three corporate industries destroy not only women’s (and growing numbers of men’s) inner bodily environments but also the external environment, Mother Earth. In the final portion of the chapter, three key interventions for working with eating problems are proposed: 1) teaching patients to know their own physiological hunger and satiation and learning to respond to them; 2) teaching therapists how to do detailed inquiries into eating and body experiences that patients have trying to eat with hunger and satiation; and 3) teaching therapists how to notice and work in the inevitable embodied transference and countertransference experience.
