Behavioral Change for
Weight Management
To lose weight, it’s necessary to change your relationship with food. For weight loss to be permanent, these behavioral changes have to be permanent. We understand that this not an easy process. Changing ingrained behavior is very challenging. Most people need the help of experts to accomplish this; these experts are called psychologists.
Therefore, in addition to a Registered Dietitian and Personal Trainer, you will be working with a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. We have three psychologists on staff, all of whom have many years of experience and specific expertise in working with eating issues. Their role will be to work collaboratively with you to create a new healthier lifestyle.
Beyond working on immediate problems, we will prepare you in advance to deal with the issues you will face on the road to long term weight management success. If you haven’t been successful in the past, it’s not surprising – no one may have taught you the necessary skills. We can do that.
The approach used during your sessions will be based on cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a well-studied, structured, time-limited, goal-oriented technique. Extensive research on this approach has demonstrated great success with numerous conditions, including a full range of eating disorders. Cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches you how to track thought patterns that may be contributing to your weight and other struggles, how to challenge these thoughts, and restructure them. Changing your thoughts often leads to changes in your emotional state and subsequent behavior. So, we’ll teach you how to think and react differently to what is happening in your life, thereby empowering you to control your emotional and behavioral responses.
The behavioral therapy component will begin with a consultation session that will allow you and the psychologist to assess whether you are a good fit for this approach. Early sessions may also include an evaluation of the triggers that lead you to eat when you’re not physically hungry. Examples of triggers might be: you smell food; it’s lunchtime; you’re tense or sad; everyone around you is eating. Whatever the trigger, we’ll teach you various cognitive and behavioral skills to more adaptively and successfully respond to these triggers.
Many sessions will entail teaching you a new cognitive or behavioral skill and working on better utilizing the strengths you already have. Just a few examples are: the importance of sitting down when you eat; how to slow down and be “mindful”; restructuring your environment; making the time for weight management activities; learning the difference between true hunger versus cravings, etc.
It won’t always be easy. Initially, there may be unhelpful thoughts lying in wait to sabotage your progress: I can’t stand being hungry; I’ll feel better if I eat; It’s so unfair that other people can eat what they want, and so forth. We’ll help you to generate an adaptive response to each of these negative thoughts. Unlike other “quick fixes”, these cognitive-behavioral skills have been shown to last for the long haul, far beyond the end of treatment.
A permanent change in your weight will require a permanent change in your lifestyle. We’re not going to put you on a diet for twelve weeks or six months. There is overwhelming evidence that “diets” result in temporary weight loss and in fact, make people gain weight over time. Instead, we’re going to help you to learn about and permanently adopt the most important elements of a new, healthier lifestyle, which includes improved physical and psychological wellbeing.
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