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Liana Salvucci at her Harley Street practice |
‘An eating disorder is not just physical’
Life coach aims to tackle addiction issues
IN London, with pizzerias, curry houses, and even health food stores on every street corner, the desire to indulge is easily fulfilled.
On my short walk between Warren Street station and the salubrious Harley Street offices of eating disorder practitioner Liana Salvucci, there were at least 30 opportunities for instant gratification.
Certainly most of us feel guilty of over-eating or poor diet at some stage.
But Ms Salvucci, 34, who lives in South Villas in Camden Square with her husband and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, says there is stark difference between caring about your food intake and becoming fanatical.
Ms Salvucci, who was brought up on a farm on the outskirts of Rome, said her own problem with overeating started with a starvation diet when she was 16, because, at two stone overweight, she was not happy with the way she looked.
She said: “I started to obsess about food.
“Forcing myself to starve, I wouldn’t go out until I lost the weight. Of course, when you start eating again you put everything back on with interest.”
Her academic performance declined, as did her social life.
Mostly people didn’t understand her condition.
“They would say things like ‘eat when you’re hungry’, ‘eat less’, ‘go on a diet’ or ‘just eat a little bit of chocolate, not the whole bar’,” she said.
“People see a big person and think ‘she’s not got enough will-power’ but an eating disorder is not about having a good appetite.
“It’s not just physical. It’s emotional as well,” said Ms Salvucci.
She added: “Often the problem is rooted in seeking to avoid intimacy.
“Very often there is abuse, wrong relationships with the father or love-hate relationships with the mother which, for women, is also linked with men and intimacy.”
About 30 per cent of her clients are men with conditions ranging from bigorexia, an obsession about being muscular, to orthorexia, an obsession with healthy eating.
Studying Japanese and Chinese to postgraduate level, Ms Salvucci worked in the travel industry.
But, she says, her real passion was to improve her relationship with herself and with other people. She set about training to become a life-coach, completing diplomas in life and recovery coaching, neurolinguistic programming and eating disorders.
Patients who attend her sessions compile a food diary, including the feelings they experience at the time of eating.
She then helps her clients develop coping strategies.
Her vision to “empower people with addictions” and heal herself has clearly had some success.
She said: “A client I was just talking to says he has so much time on his hands now that he is no longer bingeing, he’s going to write a book.”
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