- Half of the overweight patients who attend a nutrition appointment do not return for a second appointment.
- Comprehensive treatments with psychology in patients with eating disorders such as obesity achieve positive progress in 90% of cases.
- Thoughts create habits, so a diet plan is just the beginning of a project to track and change eating disorders.
Sometimes it is thought that the psychology is not related to physical health but it is not like that because it is an aspect of great relevance for problems such as obesity. For a treatment to offer the best possible results to patients, it must be comprehensive.
According to Imagine, a comprehensive clinic dedicated to optimizing the physical, psychological and emotional state of health of people with complications associated with nutrition, 90% of patients who accompany nutritional treatment with psychological therapy achieve positive results.
“The goal of nutritional consultations is to help the patient improve their lifestyle for their health. This requires a change of mentality because it is about generating healthy habits. For this, it is essential to integrate a psychological therapy within the treatment, especially in those cases where the patient’s life is at risk”, says Jimena González, a nutritionist specialized in clinical metabolism and a protein diet.
And it is that according to specialists, without accompanying psychological therapy, 50% of patients will not return to their second appointment. While only about 25% achieved sustained results, because overweight and obesity, in most cases, are related to compulsive behaviors linked to life experiences.
“This type of compulsive behavior is a resource that people use to deal with discomfort or a traumatic experience. This experience can arise at any time. From themes in childhood to a radical change of routine in adulthood. It is important to understand that sometimes people lack the skills to deal with certain situations and seek other resources for which they should not be judged or blamed, the therapist’s empathy is essential”.
Emotions are an important part of the dynamics of weight control. There are some diseases and habits that combined can lead to eating disorders.
Therefore, it must be understood that all weight-related mental disorders are psychosocial phenomena in which both the physical and emotional health and the interaction of the individual with the environment can affect their condition. Thus, we can find cases in which the family has good eating habits, but the patient is obese, which implies that there is an organic problem or an experience that favors the development of this problem.
The solution will be to apply a comprehensive system that not only provides a nutritional tool but also psychological support to develop new eating habits. The specialists at Clínica Imagine recommend seeing a specialist to deal with eating problems if the following are seen, such as:
1. Psychological discomfort: Although you can have good physical health, it is possible that an overweight or obese person has affectations in their behaviors. People can feel down when their clothes no longer fit them, when they have a chaotic relationship with their size and weight, when they notice certain changes in their perception of themselves, etc.
2. Physical consequences: It may happen that a person who is overweight or obese is at risk of developing diseases highly related to these nutritional problems. Although the ideal is to go to a specialist to prevent these diseases, it is common to observe that patients resort to these in situations in which there is already a physical condition (high cholesterol, lack of nutrients, excess fat, among others). ).
3. Discomfort denial: Sometimes patients can feel completely fine both physically and psychologically. In these cases, it is the relatives and people close to the patient who detect that there is an eating problem. When this happens, it is these that convince the patient to take treatment and therapy.
Losing weight is not an immediate matter
Different articles point out the relationship between image and weight. When undergoing an immediate weight loss method such as surgery, the personal perception that was had before the surgical process is not really changed.
For this reason, it is important that, if you opt for a procedure of this nature, not only an efficient nutritional follow-up is carried out, but also psychological therapy is used to not only combat overweight immediately, but also from habits.