Help with Weight Loss
If you are reading this, the chances are that you have been trying to lose weight and have repeatedly failed. You may have tried dieting once or many times, you may have had some successes along the way, but at some point you end up either back where you started, or you have gained more weight. This is a depressing cycle to be trapped in. You may ask yourself: Why do I keep failing? Why can’t I stick to it? Why do I get food cravings? How can I control emotional eating? What are my triggers? Why am I stuck in this cycle?
How I can help:
I work as a psychodynamic psychotherapist and counsellor. I specialise in better understanding our unconscious process. Most of the body works via unconscious process e.g. breathing, blinking, healing from a wound, this list is endless. Many of these automatic unconscious processes are there to protect us; for example, recoiling from touching a hot surface. It isn’t a huge leap to recognise that our mind has a similar function. It protects us from psychological pain, against what we may find unbearable in any particular moment, quite often by making us forget some or all of difficult experiences, so that we maintain our mental equilibrium. This is called Repression. That said, some of the feelings attached to these difficult experiences remain, and can become triggers to maladaptive behaviours, which can manifest in problems around eating and managing our weight. The reason many people don’t succeed in long term weight management is because the root cause is unknown, it has been Repressed. It is also unique to each of us depending on our own, personal circumstances, but failure to achieve our goals can be linked to low self esteem, lack of capacity to care for ourselves and resistance to change.
I offer a 12 week specialised course of individual therapy to explore the cause of your difficulties around food and managing your weight. The course will cover many areas including understanding your particular triggers and craving cycle, the negative and destructive thought processes that you are stuck in, which are preventing you from achieving your goals and working on your self esteem to move on towards success. Once you understand yourself better and how you may be sabotaging your own success, the triggers which cause emotional eating, and the cause of low self esteem, the process of healing begins as does the capacity to take care of yourself as you want and need to. Therapy provides a safe space to explore your difficulties and begin working through them.
I also run a weight loss support group on an 12 week cycle. This is a weekly support group of ten people (any gender) to run along side the healthy eating plan you are undertaking, to give you additional support for success. Most weight loss groups do not provide space to talk about yourself or the difficulties that you are personally experiencing and assumes one format will suit everyone. This weight loss support group is very different. It offers a space to begin real self reflection, to tell your story, get support from a trained mental health professional and in addition, support from a group of people who know and understand your difficulties and who will often have useful insights and experiences to share. This confidential space will support you to keep up with the things you need to do to succeed with your weight loss plan. We’ll be looking at food tracking, triggers, emotional eating, low self esteem and much more. This is not group therapy, rather a support group which offers more space to concentrate on your weight loss objectives, better understand your unique barriers to success and get additional support from each other whilst going through this difficult journey. The group is non-judgemental, respectful and completely confidential. All cameras must be on and no recording is permitted.