Neurofeedback Brainwave Training & Bioregulation Therapy (BRT)
|
Rewire Your Brain for Healthy Eating Patterns and Body Confidence
Our therapeutic technologies support emotion, appetite, and eating regulation, reduce stress-eating patterns, and foster the mind-body connection. 
At Non-Dieting Health, we view disordered eating patterns and body image struggles as signs of chronic stress or trauma. Many people who struggle have experienced adversities such as abuse, violation, or neglect, and/or community adversities such as exposure to diet culture, being alienated, bullied, lack of opportunity, discrimination, and poverty. These stressors can lock your mind into shame and fear and your physiological state into defense mode. When life's stressors leave you feeling unworthy, unattractive, or not enough, you might turn to dieting. It's easy to believe the hype and promise that your confidence will grow if you change your outer self.
Dieting has been heavily promoted, normalized, and associated with health by the $72 billion diet industry. But it's not healthy. Dieting is actually risky behavior. It is correlated with binge eating, disordered eating patterns, less satisfaction with life, body dysmorphia, metabolic disorders, even weight gain. When dieters push their bodies into nutritional and energetic deficits, they are likely to trigger the brain's survival responses. This can paradoxically intensify the drive to eat, increase dependence on highly rewarding foods, cause metabolic disruption and malnutrition. As the dieter's brain defends itself from the threat of malnutrition and chronic stress, dieters find themselves in a tug-of-war between their desire to reduce weight and their body's powerful weight regulation system that expertly defends its energy stores. As research reveals, this war on the body paradoxically makes many dieters heavier, hungrier, and sick. Dieting causes so many problems that we believe diets, like cigarettes, should come with warning labels, and that a non-dieting perspective should be taught in high school health classes alongside sex education! A Non-Dieting Paradigm for Health When the diet mentality and lifestyle have turned your relationship with food and your body into a source of pain, another diet or exercise strategy won't fix it. As Einstein said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." What is needed is a non-dieting perspective on health that restores your natural ability to regulate your eating, emotions, and thoughts while developing confidence in your natural self. We use neurofeedback brainwave training and bioregulation therapy to do just that. Together these therapies unlock the dieter's mind-body from chronic fear, stress, and shame. Neurofeedback settles and stabilizes the nervous system, while bioregulation therapy supports healthy digestion, metabolism, and cellular activity. Together these modalities improve your emotion, appetite, and eating regulation abilities while reducing shame-based and distorted thinking. As self-regulation capacity improves, our clients notice they are less reactive to stress-eating and shame triggers, that their eating pattern is normalizing, and that they feel more satisfied with their bodies, the food they eat, and the life they have. A Foundation for Whole-Person Health Many people who struggle with disordered eating and body image also experience other stress-related health problems. As we support a healthy nervous system through neurofeedback training and bioregulation therapy, our clients are likely to see improvements in areas of their life beyond eating and body image. Below is a list of conditions we can often improve with treatment:
What are neurofeedback and bioregulation therapy like? Your practitioner will start your therapy with a comprehensive assessment to devise a treatment plan tailored to you. For the client, treatment involves sitting on a bioregulation therapy mat, in a comfy chair, for about fifty minutes per session. During that time, you will watch a pleasant scene like a rainforest hike or a moving mandala on the monitor in front of you. Your practitioner will place sensors on your head in formations that correspond to targeted therapeutic effects. The sensors do not put anything into your head. Instead, they read your brainwave activity and feed it into the computer. The computer uses the data to render the scene you are watching. As your brainwave activity changes, so does the image in front of you. Changes in the scene such as volume, color, clarity, and speed gently redirect brainwave activity into more functional patterns. Over time, with regular training, clients shift into a new state that many experience as a quiet mind, a sense of inner peace, reduced food cravings, better sleep, improved focus, energy, and brain performance, and a feeling of agency over food and feelings. |
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find barriers within yourself that you have built against it." 
Listen as Dawn Harris, forensic and clinical psychologist, talks with her client about her experience with neurofeedback.
This video is offered for educational purposes, Dr. Harris is not associated with Non-Dieting Health. Listen as Dr. Sue Othmer discusses how neurofeedback can assist those who suffer from trauma and PTSD.
This video is offered for educational purposes, Dr. Othmer is not associated with Non-Dieting Health. |
When our founder, Alison Ross, became a psychotherapist, she knew she couldn't just talk her clients out of eating and body image struggles. To foster recovery, she needed to calm their activated nervous systems. This knowledge came, in part, from her own experience of recovering from disordered eating and body image struggles. Her recovery involved a yoga and mindfulness practice that unlocked her nervous system from its fight-and-flight position and improved her ability to regulate her emotional and thinking states and eating behavior. She became a neurofeedback and bioregulation practitioner when she realized that the therapeutic methods offer similar benefits to an intensive mindfulness and yoga practice, but much faster and without effort on the client's part. And she quickly recognized that neurofeedback was the missing therapeutic piece for her clients. You can read about her recovery insights in her book, Non-Dieting: How to Love Your Body and Be Healthy in Diet Culture.
|
Contact us for a free 15-minute consult to learn about how neurofeedback can assist your recovery from disordered eating, body image struggles, and other stress-related mental and physical disorders.
|
(1) van der Kolk BA, Hodgdon H, Gapen M, Musicaro R, Suvak MK, Hamlin E, Spinazzola J. A Randomized Controlled Study of Neurofeedback for Chronic PTSD. PLoS One. 2016 Dec 16;11(12):e0166752. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166752. Erratum in: PLoS One. 2019 Apr 24;14(4):e0215940. PMID: 27992435; PMCID: PMC5161315.
(2) Warren JM, Smith N, Ashwell M. A structured literature review on the role of mindfulness, mindful eating and intuitive eating in changing eating behaviours: effectiveness and associated potential mechanisms. Nutr Res behaviorsDec;30(2):272-283. doi: 10.1017/S0954422417000154. Epub 2017 Jul 18. PMID: 28718396.
