Courses For Emotional Eaters
The Understanding Your Eating programme has now launched, and it has its own website at www.understandingyoureating.co.uk.
Understanding Your Eatingc has developed as a commercial programme out of research conducted by Professor Julia Buckroyd at the University of Hertfordshire. This group programme is designed to offer a publicly available resource for people who are aware that their over eating or compulsive eating is emotionally driven. It does not offer dieting or exercise advice or products, since it is based on the assumption that the vast majority of those who are overweight or suffer from disordered eating know what it is that they should be doing. The problem lies in doing it and in continuing to do it for the future. The literature on which the programme is based and an earlier form of the intervention, is described in J Buckroyd and S Rother (2007) Therapeutic Groups for Obese Women. Chicester: Wiley.
The programme has three parts. The first part is an introduction to the programme and consists of five seminars conducted weekly and lasting one and a half hours. The seminars have the following titles:
- Seminar 1 – Eating is not just about hunger!
- Seminar 2 – Eating to manage feelings
- Seminar 3 – Self esteem and how it helps you look after yourself better
- Seminar 4 – Improving body esteem
- Seminar 5 – Using people instead of food to get you through the day
The second part of the programme consists of nine free-standing modules of four weeks, each weekly seminar lasting one and a half hours. These modules which can be selected by participants according to choice deal in greater depth with the material covered in the introductory seminars and have the following titles:
- Emotional Eating
- Feelings and Thoughts
- Motivation and Empowerment
- Food Monitoring
- Activity
- Self Nurture
- Relationships
- Self Esteem
- Body Esteem
The third part of the programme offers support via email or telephone for those who have participated in at least the introduction.
The first two parts of the programme are conducted in groups. The introduction has no more than 15 participants; the modules have no more than 10. Currently the support package is offered on an individual basis but there are plans to develop internet support groups.
The programme was piloted from October 2007 to July 2008 at the University of Hertfordshire but since August 2008 has been developed as commercial project to be delivered in a range of different locations, initially in Herts, Beds, Bucks and Cambs. For further detail see www.understandingyoureating.co.uk,
