Lifestyle Choices

The behavioural treatment of obesity is based on changing daily habits and behaviours to reach the desired goal. The basic premise of behaviour therapy is to reward beneficial behaviours and discourage detrimental ones. However, state of the art behavioural treatment has a wider perspective and focuses on eating behaviours, social support, exercise, attitudes and nutrition. The aim is to modify the situations which promote eating and to evaluate the consequences of eating behaviour. Behaviour therapy involves specific processes which are aimed at modifying behaviour.

Self-monitoring

The client is asked to monitor when she eats, how much she eats and why she eats. This increases self-awareness so that eating cannot ‘just happen’, and enables her to evaluate her success and whether any changes have occurred. put their eating into context and to learn to say ‘I am not useless, the odd slip is inevitable and I will now return to my diet‘. This eradicates an ‘all or nothing response’ which can often result in the client abandoning the diet. (more…)

The results from this suggest that things are not quite as gloomy as predicted. However, even when women are involved in a strict regime with supervision and support, weight loss and in particular maintaining this weight loss is very difficult. Other studies have also investigated weight loss in the obese and have found similar results. In 1986 Dr Kramer and his colleagues found that 70 per cent of his obese dieters regained all the weight they had lost and a further study suggests that up to 81 per cent of obese dieters may weigh the same as they did before dieting.

This would suggest there is still no hard and fast set of rules for weight loss if you are obese. Dieting may result in initial weight loss but maintaining this loss is problematic. However, this does not mean that the obese and overweight should necessarily give up or stop asking for professional help. (more…)

When discussing the effects of the study carried out in America, Keys and his colleagues said: ‘Food in all its ramifications became the principal topic of conversation, reading, and daydreams for almost all… subjects.’

The first change that became obvious for the women in my study was that they became preoccupied with food.

As women, in a society where we are expected to shop, cook and provide food for our families, food already plays a central role in our lives. It becomes a way to show love and affection to our dependants and a way to ask for love from those we are dependent on. If we provide dinner for our husbands when they come home from work (even if we ourselves have been working!) it shows that we appreciate that they have been working hard (and, it suggests, even harder than us) and that we recognise how much they do for us. Children learn from a very early age that eating their mother’s food makes her feel positive and valued. They also learn that to refuse her food is rejecting her love and will make her anxious and upset. We think about food in terms way beyond the limitations of feeling hungry and needing sustenance. (more…)

The second obvious change which happens to dieters is that they become preoccupied and obsessed with their weight. The original motivation to lose weight is complex and yet the main focus is to feel and look more attractive and to feel in control.

Yet dieting shifts the focus from feeling and looking better to what the scales say. Weight/height charts do not say that your ideal weight is when you feel good about yourself. They say you should weigh 8 stone 31/2 pounds or 9 stone 2 pounds. They precisely select and advise a weight for you. Every women has a different bone structure, a different facial structure and is a different age. What may suit a 30-year-old would make a 45-year-old look scrawny, and yet the dieting industry sells us a specific weight as if we are all the same. (more…)

Dieting changes your mood and mood changes can cause overeating. Dieters often report feeling positive and motivated at the beginning of a diet. It provides a structure and a goal, and a way to confront life’s problems. However, dieting can also cause misery and feelings of inadequacy.

Women set themselves targets. They aim for a specific rate of weight loss and decide that all they have to do is eat less! However, it is not as simple as this and not losing weight or diet-breaking is depressing. Not being able to achieve these goals can make you feel a failure. Diet-breaking is understood in terms of being weak-willed, and this idea is promoted by the dieting industry which suggests that weight loss is a sign of control, thinness is a sign of control, and not sticking to its diet sheets is due to weakness and not the fault of its diet. (more…)

Dieters become preoccupied with the very substance they are trying to avoid — food. Not all foods, but those which are forbidden and outside the limitations set by the diet. Dieters see these foods as more exciting and pleasurable, and they become increasingly so if they are not eaten for a while.

A well-documented behaviour shown by dieters suggests that if they do actually eat a forbidden food, such as a chocolate bar or a piece of cake, they will then eat more food after it than if they had not eaten that piece of chocolate in the first place. You would expect them to eat less.

Many studies have been carried out both in America and Britain to illustrate this paradoxical behaviour, during which dieters are asked to consume a high calorie food. This is often very hard for the experimenter to do, although not as unethical as it may seem since the dieters always have the choice to say no. (more…)