Psychonutritional management of overweight and obesity, Part 1

Some of your patients with overweight or obesity do not respond, or no longer respond, to a purely micronutritional approach, because the blocks are psychological before they are metabolic. This training gives you concrete tools to recognise these situations and support these patients towards free, healthy and serene eating behaviour, when lifting the metabolic blocks alone is no longer enough.

What you will learn

• Distinguish, from real clinical cases, when to favour a micronutritional approach and when to begin psychonutritional work, when two patients consult for the same reason.
• Retrace a patient's weight history and help them understand the notions of set-point weight, in order to soften an often conflictual relationship with weight.
• Conduct a cognitive restructuring exercise (the ABCDE grid) to spot automatic thoughts and their filters, extrapolation to the future, exaggeration and demand, which are triggered at the moment of weighing.
• Reconnect the patient to their physical hunger using the hunger scale, de-demonise hunger sensations and differentiate light hunger, true hunger and hypoglycaemia.
• Have them practise mindful tasting to decorrelate pleasure from quantity and reintroduce foods perceived as forbidden.
• Identify and support the seven types of hunger (eyes, nose, mouth, stomach, cells, mind and heart) to respond to them appropriately.

On the programme

• The relationship with weight: weight history, set-point weight, Epictetus's distinction between what depends on the patient and what does not, calculation of the average weight and the limits of BMI.
• Cognitive restructuring: automatic thoughts, identifying distorting filters and working on daily weighing.
• Connecting to physical hunger: the hunger scale, the vase metaphor, monitoring exercise and de-demonising hunger.
• Mindful eating: gathering yourself before eating, doing nothing but eating, and a guided comparative tasting.
• The seven types of hunger: recognition, intensity, mouth hunger, mental hunger and heart hunger, with the free and healthy eater's grid as a follow-up tool.
• Practical exercises, role-plays and audio recordings to reproduce in consultation, as well as concrete benchmarks on the rhythm and organisation of sessions.

Who it is for

This training is for healthcare professionals already familiar with micronutrition, pharmacists, doctors, dietitians and practitioners supporting patients with overweight, obesity or metabolic syndrome, who wish to enrich their management with a psychonutritional dimension.

At the end of the training

You will be able to identify the patients for whom psychonutritional work is a priority and adapt your stance accordingly, setting aside a dietitian's discourse when it reinforces cognitive restriction. You will have structured exercises to soften the relationship with weight, reconnect the patient to their hunger sensations and lead them to eat mindfully. You will also recognise the limits of your scope of practice and the situations that call for referral to a specialist.