CHANGING BEHAVIOUR
The heart of the Wellspring programme is behavioural change, because if the behaviours that contributed to the weight gain do not change, the student is almost certain to regain the weight lost at Wellspring. Wellspring’s expectation is that behaviours will change permanently and that students will continue losing weight at home. This has been the typical student’s experience.
Every Wellspring student works closely with an experienced “behavioural coach.” Don’t be fooled by the name: Wellspring behavioural coaches are trained therapists with a Master’s or Doctorate qualification.
There are two components to Wellspring’s behavioural change programme. First, students receive intensive training on the set of behaviours demonstrated by research to be required for successful long-term weight control. These behaviours include:
- Self-monitoring
- Goal-setting
- Journaling
- Contracting
This is in addition to the nutrition and culinary training students receive.
Then Wellspring behavioural coaches utilise cognitive-behavioural therapy to both reinforce the training and to help students overcome any barriers to mastering these behaviours.
All Wellspring students will encounter barriers. Typically, these are the same issues that are contributing to the weight gain in the first instance (e.g., use of food as a coping mechanism for dealing with stress, boredom, emotion), but through cognitive-behavioural therapy sessions with the behavioural coach, students replace unhealthy coping mechanisms with a set of healthy coping skills. Critically, frustration tolerance is increased and students develop skills that allow them to manage stress much more effectively. Behavioural coaches also utilise methods such as goal-setting, stimulus control, decision counselling, rational emotive therapy, relapse prevention training and positive focusing.
Research demonstrates that cognitive-behavioural therapy is key to helping overweight people manage their weight successfully. Cognitive-behavioural therapy helps people become better self-regulators, setting effective goals, observing themselves systematically, staying committed, and successfully managing the stress of everyday life. For example, research published in the 1990s compared very overweight children who had received cognitive-behavioural therapy for weight loss with equally overweight children who didn’t receive this treatment (the control group). Ten years later, the control group actually gained weight and on average 60% of them were overweight, whereas the cognitive-behavioural therapy group lost weight and on average 30% of them were overweight. Wellspring’s outcomes are continually demonstrating the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioural therapy in weight control.
A typical cognitive-behavioural session at Wellspring UK is as follows:
- Review of prior day’s events and accomplishments. The tone is always positive, oriented to problem solving and reinforcement of specific accomplishments.
- Integration of a cognitive-behavioural weight control topic, such as stimulus control, 5-step problem solving, decisional counselling, and stress management/coping.
- Assessment (from materials assigned in the last session).
- Assignment of new materials.
- Review of behavioural contracts (goals).
- Detailed review progress and self-monitoring journals.
