How I Run Weight Loss Groups
and maybe how you can too
I was never a fan of WeightWatchers, right from the early days with their stupid “pig pen” and all the way through to today with their close-to-100% failure rate (because pretty much everyone just puts it back on). And now they’re stopping the one thing that temporarily helped it to “work” which is the in-person meetings.
So I’m going to explain the entire WeightChoice program and how I run it, in the hope that some passionate psychologists, counsellors, doctors, or other health professionals might like to take it and use it. I even welcome ex-WeightWatchers leaders as long as they’re willing to learn a completely different approach. If any of those are you I also hope that you’ll charge your group members to reflect your time, energy, commitment, and expertise. It’s only fair. How much is up to you of course, but maybe have a look at what is a common fee in your area and don’t go cheap, please.
I realise I give a lot of stuff away, but at the same time I’m building a paid professional community so that’s my “payoff” if you like.
So as well as taking full advantage of the following articles, consider whether you’d like to really master the program, and if so join the membership at www.psychologybestpractice.org where we provide all the training programs, along with personalised, ongoing mentoring to implement successfully. It’s just $1 for a 30-day trial (I’d charge $0 but unfortunately I’d be inundated with bots - it’s a way of keeping things secure). That includes the full WeightChoice Training Program for therapists, handouts, support, demo videos, everything.
Preliminary Meeting
Participants are asked to read through the client handout material (honestly, get it for $1) prior to their first meeting, which will primarily be a meet and greet to welcome individuals and help them to feel comfortable in the group, and to begin to understand what has to happen before we can achieve automatic and permanent healthy weight.
This understanding includes being realistic about what a healthy body actually is, and how unrealistic (or even fake) are many of the “perfect” images we see. I’m not interested in helping people to become skeletal, and neither do I want to buy into body obsession. This is about health and feeling good because we can function optimally physically for our age and health status, and maybe about feeling good in the clothes we want to wear.
WeightChoice is not about dieting, although people may choose to cut their calories more aggressively if they want a faster result. However, having said that, if you start dieting and start kidding yourself about what you really, deep down, desire to eat or drink, you will miss amazing opportunities to free yourself forever from unwanted/unhealthy body fat. In order to support you and work with you to experience true success, we need to know what’s really going on with you, and that will involve looking at the calories that you naturally consume when you’re not “being good” so we have the deepest possible understanding of precisely how the excess weight was gained.
Let me stress right here that this is not something that can be skipped. We’ve had people skip this essential work and try to go straight to one of the techniques that switches off cravings. And that, my friend, is a complete and utter waste of time. You simply must take the time to get this deep and comprehensive understanding of exactly HOW that excess weight accumulated.
Something else that’s important to stress is that we’re never going to suggest people deprive themselves of any food. A lot of people lead highly stressful lives and food can play an important role in self comforting, as can alcohol. We need to respect that ripping away their comfort is not going to help and may make things worse. And any outcome will only be temporary because deprivation has a 100-year-plus failure history. An essential part of someone’s recovery from overweight may mean resolving lifestyle issues or comorbidity which a group leader may or may not be qualified to assist. Be prepared to refer clients to expert support if necessary. If you’re a psychologist you may recommend individual sessions where appropriate.
So I have to stress that WeightChoice is not about aiming for the “perfect body”. Sure, there are people who’re really into body building and body sculpting (and who may still need our help if they’re struggling with food, so they can get the most out of their fitness programs), but the great majority of men and women just want to feel good in their clothes, be able to do physical things without being exhausted, like playing with kids or grandkids for example, or going back to a sport they used to love.
Where WeightChoice shines is in freeing you from all the things that over time have caused you to gain excess body fat, so that you’re simply not capable of being a person who does that any more. These could be:
Amnesic eating (extremely common!)
Compulsive or obsessive eating
Secret eating
Emotional eating
Habitual eating
Situational eating
And of course, a level of unawareness, not actually knowing what’s really in the food or drink you’re consuming!
Now, if we don’t actually know whether any of this is going on for you, we’re not going to be very useful to you. If both you and we are blind to your natural food preferences, blind to your non-hungry triggers to eating, then we’re really in trouble.
That’s why all we want you to do for the first week is to STOP TRYING to lose weight, and just eat and drink what you deep-down really prefer to do. In case that seems frightening, let me assure you that the absolute maximum of fat you could possibly accumulate in that week would be less than a single kilo, but in return we’ll have a crystal clear catalogue of what your automatic desires and habits actually are. You might put on more than a kilo by the scales, but that will be water weight, not fat, and will disappear as quickly as it accumulated.
“Only when we know what we’re working with can we move forward quickly, easily, and for real.”
So there’s only one way that this works, and that’s to commit, for a whole week, to keeping your phone with you and actually photographing every single thing that goes in your mouth. So you can’t eat it or drink it until there’s a photo. At the end of each day, go through the calorie count for each item (either use an app or just Google “how many calories in ……”) and put the total for the day in your diary. Even rough is OK.
PLEASE don’t try to be “good” because all that will do is give us a false picture of what’s really going on and completely rob your chances of success. Just go for it, guilt free because this is important, and enjoy a nice week off from even thinking about what you should or shouldn’t be doing!
I know you might be keen to get on with the program, but trust me, it doesn’ have a snowball’s chance in hell of working if you don’t use this week to really reveal your unconscious preferences and really nail the actual energy count of what you’re consuming when you’re eating “no holds barred”. THAT is what we need to know if we’re to really help to free you forever from carrying excess weight.
Oh, and write down your beginning weight and your ideal weight (realistic for age and lifestyle choices) so that’s on record too, and share these in the support group so that we know you’re on track. It might be convenient to use an app like Google Sheets to keep that data and check weekly to follow your progress.
In relation to writing down beginning weight, I point people to page 11 of their client handouts, where they can use a free web site to calculate the average daily energy intake that they must be consuming in order to be the weight they are at. Without breaking the laws of physics, the body itself tells the story of energy intake, unless of course there is a serious medical condition, in which case overweight would be the least of your worries.
It is massively common for people to be in denial of what they’re eating and I don’t believe this is because they’re lying. I do believe that eating can be amnesic, especially when people have been trying to impose strict diets on themselves. The calculation mentioned above, together with the photographic diary, and the reassurance that this is a common trick of the unconscious when the person is subjected to deprivation, is a gentle way to reveal this.
I’ll give an example of how that calculation works in the next article in this series.