Addicted to Energy Deficit - Your Neuroscience Based Guide to Restrictive Eating Disorders

When a restrictive eating disorder has had a destructive effect on your life or the life of someone you care about and you haven’t been able to understand why it’s so hard to overcome, Addicted to Energy Deficit is the book you need.

Bringing in neuroscience and research evidence, as well as personal and professional experience, Helly Barnes provides an explanation for restrictive eating disorders that will resolve your unanswered questions and fit your experience.

This includes:

• A credible explanation for restrictive eating disorders as a brain-based addiction to the state of energy deficit.
• The evolutionary, genetic and external factors that made you susceptible.
• The most effective methods to overcome the addictive pursuit of energy deficit.
• How to reprogram your brain through processes of deep learning and dopamine restoration.
• Why self-empowerment, support and connection are critical.
• The cause of extreme levels of hunger and why you need to respond to them.
• The importance of set point theory and fat overshoot.
• Why you are not as afraid of weight gain as you think.
• How to avoid relapse WHEN you find your free future.

This informative and compassionate guide will give you a deeper understanding of yourself and the eating disorder. You will believe that you can overcome it and feel empowered to take the necessary steps to do so.

A Review of the book by Eva Musby, author of ’Anorexia and Other Eating Disorders: How to Help Your Child Eat Well and Be Well’:

＂Helly makes a strong case for tackling eating disorders as an addiction. She proposes that energy deficit (being underweight, eating insufficiently) leads to dopamine imbalances in those genetically vulnerable. And that restriction, as well as behaviours and rituals associated with it, brings relief from extreme fear and anxiety arising from abstinence.

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Using the addiction model, she explains tasks of recovery: nutrition, weight recovery, abstaining from behaviours, bringing back normality... She offers explanations for the mental hunger a person may feel even when their stomach is full, the need for overshoot, why the fear of becoming fat tends to disappear with weight gain.

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I enjoyed reading this book. It’s very well written, and there is loads I recognise from the treatment of teens, as well as differences...

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If, in spite of Helly Barnes’ scientific references, you disagree with the eating-disorder-as-addiction-model... you will still get loads out of this book. Models matter because they guide our actions as we make treatment decisions. What Helly proposes is infinitely more helpful than common models that an eating disorder is all about control, terrible parenting, social media, or a desire to be thin, or that it’s a monster that we parents can hate and shout at. There’s plenty to think about as you read Helly Barnes’ engaging book.

If you’re reading it as a parent, it will increase your awareness of your child’s experience. If your child is an adult then Helly is someone to follow and learn from. If you’re an adult with an eating disorder, this book will give you clarity and courage for you to work towards complete recovery＂