No, this is exactly what real doctors do. On the medical side specifically.
Watch any show involving a real medical doctor and eating disorders (or anything for that matter). Like I said, it is detrimental for a doctor to use ambiguous "soft" language, especially for an emotional thinking person who is errantly believing and behaving a certain way.
The opposite is logical thinking, i.e. attempting to understand reality exactly as it is. It's important to understand and accept reality, especially when a life is in danger. As such, medical doctors speak in terms of reality: hard numbers and definitive lines in the sand.
If the doc said, "We need you here just a little while so you can gain some weight," that type of subjective speech invites wrongful, emotional thinking interpretations. What's a "little while" to her and "some weight" to her is subjective, especially when her thoughts about herself (she is fat) are clearly and already distorted.
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- The first step is to destroy the person's objectively false and damaging view. The denial. Without this, there's no hope to any help or recovery. Appealing to a person's incorrect feelings about something is never helpful.
- Once the person establishes there's something wrong, they need to know what is right and work towards that.
- Because their way of thinking is emotional and distorted, they need hard-set reality to reach for (which is important in all goal setting for success in practically all life matters), which helps in the long term.
- This then creates physically verifiable achievements and steps that matches reality with progress, which helps maintain a person's correct (or at least passably acceptable) concept of reality, training them to not just "face facts", but deal with them accordingly.
- The final step that brings them out is they know bad/undesirable things, even uncontrollable things, happen. But they know they can take action where possible and accept where they can't. A person with this mentality is much less likely to have mental health distortion issues.
That said, medical doctors, even psychiatrists, do not have counseling in their background. That's why people like Dr. Now on _My 600-lb Life_ refers his patients to counseling services. But he steps his foot down and challenges his patients with reality all the time, and requires them to reach physical weight goals in numbers... he's one of the most successful doctors in the field, and he's not the only one who uses this approach.