About
About Rebecca
Creating Disordered Eating Awareness
Rebecca Cooper is world renowned for her expertise in disordered eating, eating disorders, and food addictions. Rebecca has trained mental health professionals in Israel, Panama, Portugal, France, South Africa, Buenos Aires, Belgium, and throughout the United States, about her unique non-diet, DietQ step-by-step method to change people’s eating behaviors.
Rebecca holds a World Certificate for Psychotherapy, is a licensed therapist, clinical counselor and Certified Eating Disorder Specialist and Supervisor. Rebecca wrote the best-selling book, “Diets Don’t Work®.” Ms. Cooper also has appeared on television on CNN, Fox, Bravo, Lifetime, CBS, ABC, and TBN. She regularly speaks on webcasts, professional conferences, International mental health conferences, and community events to promote eating disorder awareness and diet recovery.
In 1999, she founded a treatment center, Rebecca’s House Eating Disorder Treatment Center, where thousands of people around the world have corrected their unwanted behaviors around food, weight, diet, and body size. Rebecca also created a non-profit, Rebecca’s Eating Disorder Foundation (501c.3), for scholarship funds for people who could not afford treatment. Her step-by-step Courses now allows you to learn her methods in the privacy of your own home with the assistance of your individual Coach. Your program is tailored to your own DietQ Type. Then you will learn how to remove the blocks that has been preventing you from achieving and maintaining your ideal weight for a lifetime!
“It has been my life’s passion to help people out of the cycles of dieting, overeating, food cravings, disordered thinking, and the negative emotions associated with disordered eating.”
“I know how it feels to keep trying one thing after another to change and nothing works. When I was 13 years old I started with my first diet that took me into a vortex of disordered eating that consumed my life. I have been able to maintain my ideal weight since 1987 without dieting or doing anything crazy.”
“I have seen thousands of lives change using this method. It is a freedom that I want to give to others and now everyone can have access to this revolutionary step-by-step program anywhere there is an internet access.”
“This non-diet, diet removes the reason why you eat when you do not want to. It just makes sense!”
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Who Am i
Who am I? I would have answered this question a lot differently in past years. I would have told you about my degrees, licenses, awards, television appearances, speaking at conferences around the world, books published, articles written, starting the first transitional living residence for eating disorders, creating a non-profit for eating disorders, and establishing a world-renown eating disorder treatment center in Southern California. (I guess, I just did. Ego is still alive and well. If this matters to you click here for the details.)
Today I will tell you I have over three decades of recovery and have been blessed to help many others recover. Helping others became my mission and purpose. I know what it is like to be consumed with the thoughts, emotions, and actions of substances, food, and disordered eating behaviors. Not everyone has traveled this path but those who have, need to know that there is a way out.
For so many years I reacted to feelings, thoughts, situations, and people through the lens of my unhealed past. I had no idea that I was seeing and behaving in the world through this filter. Unconsciously, I would try to avoid pain and seek pleasure rather than confront my unhealed wounds. I had no idea that my past influenced my present.
I started at a very early age by blocking out any pain, real or perceived, by using food. It was more acceptable to concentrate on eating than to cry. I found that thinking about food, weight, diets, body image, exercise, or hating myself was a way to push down any feeling that was trying to surface. This became such an ingrained habit that I spent many years in the grips of various eating disorders. My eating thoughts and behaviors became my way of coping with the world instead of feeling my internal landscape. Someone or something would upset me, and I would immediately think about avoiding the pain I felt with the pleasure of my next food binge.
Years later I would find other addictions to avoid my obsessive compulsion with food. I would try to make myself feel better with accomplishments, new relationships, consumerism, and finally, alcohol and drugs. Not everyone who has disordered eating travels as far down the road as I did, but the pain of disordered eating is the same. It takes so much energy to keep running from the original pains because it does not go away on their own.
The original pains get triggered over and over by life and each time it grows a little more. It is no wonder that most people do not want to stop the cycle of addiction and/or disordered eating. Some will try eating disorders, extreme surgeries, medications with unknown side effects, or finally give up on trying to find a way out of disordered eating and succumb to obesity and those health consequences. Many will live a life of quiet desperation with obsessions, self-hate, failed relationships, and never be able to grow into their fullest potential.
Over three decades ago I found a way out of this dysfunctional relationship with food. I have maintained my ideal weight during all this time without dieting, drugs, using disordered eating, or being consumed by obsessive thoughts of disordered eating. I know what it feels like to live with this disorder, addiction, and compulsions and I know the path to recovery. I feel a responsibility to help others, and I have spent my life helping thousands to find this freedom and to live a life they could not even imagine.
Personal Story
Her grandfather died while she was in 6th grade. That grief was a contributing factor for Rebecca trying to find a way to numb her feelings. She would think about her weight, diets, food, and body image as a diversion. Food became a coping mechanism for her and a way to increase self-esteem through a slim outer appearance. She would overeat and then restrict food. This put her on a roller coaster of diets and binges that sent her into the vortex of an eating disorder that consumed many years of her life. Rebecca was eating and restricting food, which is commonly identified as compulsive overeating or binge eating, bulimia, and anorexia.
Her grandmother died on her 16th birthday leaving her and her sister homeless. She lived with neighbors, distant relatives, and finally, her high school teacher until she went to college. Rebecca was working her way through college dealing with the financial, academic and emotional stress with food.
She found drugs to control her overwhelming appetite and cravings. She started adding alcohol to her addictions and finally hit her bottom on February 25, 1986. Rebecca has been clean and sober since then.
Her first year of recovery was so precarious because of the eating disorder. At that time no one understood eating disorders. “I just wanted to be thin. I hated the person I saw in the mirror. The scale determined how I felt; depressed, out of control, and hopeless. I just couldn’t stop thinking about food, diets, and my weight. I ate when I didn’t want to. No one knew. I was so anxious thinking about how I would get the food, get rid of it or being found out. I didn’t think I could live without the temporary stress relief that my eating disorder provided,” Rebecca said. After almost a year of sobriety, Rebecca was freed from the merry go round of yo-yo dieting and eating disorders.
In recovery Rebecca had many obstacles to work through. Rebecca’s low self-esteem attracted her to abusive relationships. She picked men who validated her own self-contempt. During her destructive marriage she wanted to be loved so bad that she thought to have a baby would make a happy family that she never experienced. She stayed clean and sober through 6 miscarriages. Along with her 12-Step work, she did the recovery work of ‘coming home to her Self.’ This process allowed her to enter into a loving, nurturing, healthy marriage for over 20 years.
Today, she finds her experience invaluable as she helps people change their eating habits and abstain from other addictive behaviors.
After a thirty year separation Rebecca found her mother. It would never be the mother-daughter relationship she had hoped for because her mother could not forgive herself for leaving her girls so long ago. Rebecca’s mother died a few years after that. The doctor used the term “morbid obesity” with regard to her mother’s demise. Her mother still didn’t believe she had a problem with food. When Rebecca went back to her home in Ohio, she found half-eaten boxes of cookies, donuts, cake and gallons of ice cream. Right up to the day she went to the hospital Rebecca’s mother was trying to comfort herself the best way she knew how—with food. Rebecca became even more devoted to her cause. “I’ve always believed that good comes out of bad. However, I never felt that belief applied to the suffering I experienced as a result of my addictions. But today, when I see a young woman recovering from the same disease that plagued me for so long, I realize that God has a plan that is bigger than I could have ever imagined it should be”.
Curriculum Vitae
Rebecca’s Curriculum Vitae offers a thorough overview of her educational background, professional experience, skills, and accomplishments. It highlights her expertise and achievements in her field, providing a detailed record of her career progression and qualifications.