There are times of year when it seems like everyone is trying to lose weight. New year’s resolution are a prime example. Mental health clients may be struggling with weight or eating difficulties then or at any time. Sometimes these are the primary reasons people enter therapy. Other times, they are existing clients who bring about a new goal. Behavioral weight loss therapy provides an option to help.
A good proportion of weight gain is genetic (ranging between 40-80%, depending on the study group). There is also an aspect of losing weight when clients want to make changes in behavior. Effective behavioral weight loss therapy focuses on contributors to specific patterns of eating behavior (e.g., beliefs about food or control, eating disorder behaviors). It also focuses on emotional distress that results from those behaviors. These approaches impact what social science calls “self-regulation”.
Self-regulation is pretty close to how it sounds. It concerns to manage one’s behaviors in the face of difficult emotions or thoughts/beliefs in order to meet a goal. Think when you feel annoyed and think about yelling at the person taking forever in the grocery line, but you don’t. Nice work, you. That’s self-regulation.
Therapy approaches for eating disorders focus on dealing with a range of experiences. For example, beliefs in one self or a need for sense of control. They also focus on strategies to help individuals learn to regulate emotions and behaviors. These approaches help clients gain more effective use of self-regulation to allow them to behave in line with their goals. In this case, decreased unhealthy eating to lose weight and to prevent feeling subsequent shame and other distress.
So what do therapists do to help clients meet their goals of losing weight and feeling less difficult emotions? There are good research-based behavioral weight loss therapy trainings to sign up to help clients learn to cope with their emotions and boost self-regulation. They ultimately help clients change their relationship with food.
The Beck Institute has a training to sign up for to address binge eating and another for bulimia. Both provide techniques and therapist resources for client self-regulation, whether they have specific diagnoses or eating difficulties in general. These trainings also address ambivalence about behavior change and difficult emotions that go along with unhealthy eating (e.g., shame).
There is also a good expansive training to join that trains in research-based treatments for a spectrum of eating difficulties. This training covers everything from anorexia to binge-eating disorder to general self-regulation difficulties.
Losing weight is usually a difficult endeavor. A whole range of factors can contribute (genetics, behaviors, upbringing, etc). But when clients consider making behavior changes to meet weight loss goals, these behavioral weight loss therapy trainings boost your therapist resources to help.
