Culinary Counselors

by Jill Cousins

Judaism and food go hand-in-hand. And for women battling eating disorders, Jewish holidays may not be cause for celebration. Fortunately, The Renfrew Center knows how to help. 

Here’s a brief history of Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat!

That joke made its way around the internet years ago, and it’s likely you’ve heard at least one version of it. Food and the Jewish religion are intrinsically linked. Every holiday, every celebration seems to be associated with eating (or in the case of Yom Kippur, not eating).

There are weekly Shabbat dinners, Passover seders, potato latkes and jelly donuts at Chanukah, hamantaschen at Purim, honey cake for Rosh Hashanah. Bagels, challah, matzo balls, kugels, and rugelach. Establishing a healthy relationship with food can be a challenge for any Jew, with so many unhealthy traditions and the emphasis on overindulging. But, if you happen to be an observant Jew with an eating disorder, dealing with the constant emphasis on food is no    laughing matter.

“In many close-knit ethnic communities, there’s an emphasis on food,” says Sarah Bateman, the Jewish community liaison for The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders. “But so much of the focus in Judaism is around meals and food. Every holiday has its ritual foods to eat. It’s meal after meal after meal. That’s hard even for people who don’t have an eating disorder. Imagine how difficult it is for people who do.”

The Renfrew Center of Orlando is here to help. Located near the University of Central Florida campus, the eating disorder treatment center has been helping adolescent girls and young women with a variety of programs since it opened in October 2016. Nationwide, there are 17 Renfrew Centers. The Philadelphia location, established in 1985, was the first residential facility exclusively dedicated to the treatment of eating disorders.

The Orlando center, which is nonresidential, offers intensive outpatient and day-treatment programs. The Renfrew Center treats patients with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), and other specified feeding and eating disorders.

Since 2009, The Renfrew Centers have incorporated specific tracks to address the needs of Jewish women in conjunction with their group programs and individual sessions. In addition to educating staff members regarding Jewish traditions and beliefs, the center also provides kosher meals for its patients.

“We want to make sure we’re providing a place for Jewish women to feel welcome,” says Paula Edwards-Gayfield, regional assistant vice president of Renfrew Centers. “We work to align their Jewish faith with their recovery process. To do that, we work with 

rabbis and each individual’s support system and family members. We want to be sensitive to their customs and practices.”

Sometimes those customs and practices can exacerbate an eating disorder. For example, if a woman struggles with a restrictive eating disorder like anorexia, fasting on Yom Kippur could influence or reinforce that behavior.

Sarah offers another example. “Sabbath is every single weekend,” she says, “and Sabbath meals are comparable to Christmas or Thanksgiving feasts. But many women have to deal with two of them every weekend [Friday dinners and Saturday lunches in the Orthodox community]. I’ve had women come to me crying about this.”

Sarah emphasizes that there are complex psychological reasons for eating disorders, and Jewish food customs are not the cause. But the cultural requirements may make overcoming an eating disorder more challenging.

“There’s so much emphasis on food, but our focus is to not blame the person,” Sarah says. “It’s about understanding what’s been difficult for each individual and focusing on that.”

One thing that appears to be changing in the Jewish community is the stigma attached to eating disorders and mental illness, in general. Sarah actually dealt with the topic as part of a mental-health training program for rabbinical students at Yeshiva University in New York City.

“For a long time, there was a stigma around getting help for eating disorders in the Jewish community,” Sarah says. “Over the past 10 years, I’ve seen a willingness to get help and not try to hide the problem. Maybe it’s just my hope, but it seems to me that there’s more awareness and less fear of getting treatment in the Jewish community than there used to be. And awareness is always a wonderful thing.”

By incorporating Jewish-related topics such as the roles of food, body image, and family traditions, in addition to its regular programs, The Renfrew Center aims to help every woman overcome her food-related problems.

“We work to eliminate any eating disorder behavior,” Paula says, “so they can have a healthy relationship with food.”