Program wages a battle against eating disorders

When Patricia Pitts was growing up and felt unheard or misunderstood, she came to find solace in exerting control over the one thing she could — her eating habits.

From the time she was 12, she’d restrict her food intake until her body couldn’t take it anymore. Then, starving for nourishment, she’d binge. It was a destructive cycle that was hard to stop.

“There was something in me that said in order to be liked I had to be thin,” she recalled. “It was a desperate feeling, like this is going to control me for the rest of my life.”

It wasn’t until years later, when she was taking psychology courses while seeking her master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, that Pitts learned about the underpinnings of her earlier troubles and felt compelled to pursue psychology professionally.

Today, the clinical psychologist and former La Cañada resident helps others who struggled as she once did through the Bella Vita Eating Disorder Program. Counseling and nutrition services provided by the program address not just patients’ relationships with food, eating and appearance, but with the deeper underlying problems of self-worth and trauma that are believed to have caused their disorders.

With a small residential treatment center in La Cañada and another in Thousand Oaks, in addition to partial hospitalization and outpatient facilities in Eagle Rock, Woodland Hills and Santa Clarita, Pitts blends what she’s learned from her training with her own personal experience to offer a whole-person approach to treatment.

“We’re really treating the whole person, no matter what level of treatment they’re on,” she said.

When the Bella Vita was founded in 1985, diet and exercise fads abounded and rail-thin fashion models were becoming the norm, rather than the exception. While cultural patterns have since shifted, Pitts has watched America’s preoccupation with thinness and condemnation of overweight people continue to grow.

She believes the predominance of Internet and social media today — and the anonymity, one-upsmanship and obsession with appearance they foster — taps into some of the root-level psychology of eating disorders among men and women.

“Social media feeds the frenzy of individuals with eating disorders,” she said. “Having been raised on social media, teens are highly susceptible to its messages. They have learned to ask, and get immediate responses, from their peers and from the Internet.”

Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who also treats patients with eating disorders, believes social media boasting and perfectly posed selfies can intensify symptoms of depression and low self-esteem among at-risk people.

“It makes people feel worse about their bodies,” she said. “And when Facebook friends obsessed with food post photos of what they are eating … this nonstop temptation makes it much harder for a person with an eating disorder to control what she eats.”

Meanwhile, although the Internet is the home of several campaigns intended to grow support and awareness of eating disorders, others encouraging pro-ana (anorexia) and pro-mia (bulimia) lifestyles and dispensing rules and tips can fuel the fire of self-loathing, Pitts added.

For Rose, a La Cañada resident in her 50s who asked her last name be withheld to protect her identity, there was an undeniable connection between binge eating and suppressing negative feelings about self-worth. In her case, sexual abuse she suffered as a young girl caused her to eat compulsively.

Rose saw several counselors for depression, but it wasn’t until she discovered the Bella Vita program a few years back that she began to connect that early childhood trauma with her bad feelings and resultant negative behaviors.

“I was dealing with the sexual abuse, but not the eating disorder,” said Rose, who checked into Pitts’ La Cañada residential treatment center for 90 days. “I went in broken and emerged a different person, a whole person, a complete person.”

Pitts said when people are ready to understand themselves in a new way, their beliefs begin to transform.

“I watch patients every day make shifts and changes,” she said. “I’ve got to say, there’s a lot of joy in that.”

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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine