On the first day of treatment (inpatient or outpatient), the patient is handed this workbook and asked to complete the eating disorder questionnaire, thus beginning the process of having the patient confront the secrecy of their eating disorder. The therapist, or family member, reads the literature in the workbook and reviews the patient's answers and begins to understand the dynamics and the physical and emotional pain of the person with an eating disorder. The patient proceeds to move through the four levels of treatment, setting goals at each level that are reviewed by the therapist and the treatment team. The patient will continue to answer questionnaires, learn the program guidelines for meal monitoring and behavior, write essays, and begin dealing with the challenges of being honest, dealing with anger, confronting fear, taking responsibility, and learning to persevere in treatment. The patients in these programs are often resistant to treatment, seeing their identity as an anorexic patient or a bulimic patient. Through intensive therapy, and using this workbook, these patients begin to see that they are a person that has an eating disorder illness. They begin to reclaim the personality they had prior to their illness, and they gain self-acceptance and self-esteem. They come to realize that their illness is not their identity.
About the Author: Lenore McKnight is a physician with many years of specialized experience in child psychiatry. After earning her medical degree from the University of California San Francisco Medical School, Dr. McKnight completed a pediatric internship at Children's Hospital in San Francisco, and an adult psychiatry residency and child psychiatry fellowship at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UCSF. She is board certified in both adult, and child and adolescent psychiatry. Dr. McKnight is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. After over a decade in private outpatient practice in Northern California, Dr. McKnight began inpatient work at CPC Walnut Creek Psychiatric Hospital, where she served as medical director for three years. She then moved to Kaiser Permanente, where she established an inpatient adolescent eating disorders program for Kaiser patients at a San Francisco Bay Area hospital. She enriched the program by writing a comprehensive workbook for patients with eating disorders. Dr. McKnight is now retired after spending twenty-two years treating Kaiser inpatients with eating disorders.