How Can Counselling Help You Shed The Pounds?

Counselling — look it up in the dictionary and the definition is related to offering professional help or advice. It might conjure up images of Woody Allen lying on a psychiatrist’s couch for the best part of 30 years, but in reality it can be far more accessible and quick to work.

Good counselling is available in many forms and can help you to deal with the problems that life can throw at you — used alongside a good weight-loss plan, it can be the key to overcoming yo-yo dieting. As such, it can help you to address the eating and lifestyle habits that consistently lead to weight gain; therefore enabling you to keep off the excess pounds in the long term.

Cognitive behavioural therapy — or CBT as it’s commonly known — can help you to change how you think, how you feel and therefore how you behave; including how you treat food. Awarded a Grade A recommendation for treating eating disorders by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), its effectiveness has been proven in numerous trials since its development in the 1960s.

Did you realise that the way you think can at times affect your feelings and physical responses so much, that you’ll believe what your body’s telling you is real? More than often your hunger pangs are likely to be linked to your emotions than a physical need for food. Of course, changing your emotions is a tough call, but challenging the thoughts that drive them is a lot easier, and that’s where CBT comes in.

CBT can enable you to work out which thoughts ultimately result in you having a negative outlook on your weight – like boredom, stress, anger, unhappiness, frustration – and understanding this is likely in turn to influence your success in losing weight and helping you enjoy a healthier lifestyle. So, if you want to feel better, think better – CBT is a practical and effective way of doing this.

Another counselling technique which can help you to understand why you have weight problems is transactional analysis — or TA — which explores how you have developed and how this affects the way you behave. The benefits of this are that it allows you to understand the roots of your behaviour and where necessary, challenge and change it.

For example, how many times have you polished off a big Sunday lunch, even though you weren’t particularly hungry? It might be simply because you were told when you were little that you had to clear your plate. Or, maybe when you were ill or sad as a child, your mother fed you up and so now, whenever you’re feeling low, those old childhood messages direct you to food in an attempt to feel better. Of course, this is regardless of the here-and-now reality that to feel better, it can actually be of your benefit to lose weight fast — and this is possible.

TA and CBT techniques can help you to examine the aspects of your behaviour that you might have always taken for granted; behaviour that in the past may have prevented you from being the person you want to be – and can be.
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Victoria Cochrane writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.