Thank you. Sorry. I didn't want to step on toes.
I think the underlying problem is the cognitive and emotional issues that compel a person to stop eating. Thereafter it becomes a reciprocal process because the more a person engages in restricted eating, the more cognitively impaired they become. The more cognitively impaired they become, the more rigid their thinking becomes, the more preoccupied with issues related to body, food, shape, and weight they become. Then the cycle continues. It's kind of a snowball effect.
It's this combination and reciprocity that's difficult to actually halt. But when we talk about using food as treatment, what I'm speaking to there specifically is that in many cases it's about desensitizing someone to something that they need as a life-sustaining treatment. You're desensitizing somebody to something they actually need to survive and that's where the food comes in, almost a behavioural type of approach when folks are truly unable to recover in any other way and perhaps a more autonomous way.
It's a desensitization for those who are gravely ill. We really need to work hard with folks who have been quite sick and who have been eating in these distorted restrictive ways to get back into a normalized pattern, because the whole body adjusts to malnutrition. They no longer feel hunger cues. They don't have the relationship with food that you or I might take for granted. We really have to retrain folks.