Bradley Waggoner, MD

Managing the Emotions Behind Eating

How many times have you, after a particularly hard day, reached for some chocolate or ice cream? It's common for many people, but for those trying to lose weight, it can be detrimental to their long term success, and most weight-loss programs never even address it.

They focus on choosing healthier foods and exercising more, but they never answer a key question: how can people who have eaten to cope with emotions change their eating habits, when they haven't learned other ways of coping with emotions?

Researchers at Temple's Center for Obesity Research¹ are trying to figure out the answer as part of a new, NIH-funded weight loss study. The new treatment incorporates skills that directly address the emotional eating, and essentially adds those skills to a state-of-the art behavioral weight loss treatment.

"The problem that we're trying to address is that the success rates for long-term weight loss are not as good as we would like them to be," said Edie Goldbacher, a postdoctoral fellow at CORE. "Emotional eating may be one reason why people don't do as well in behavioral weight loss groups, because these groups don't address emotional eating or any of its contributing factors."

The study has already had one wave of participants come through, and many participants have seen some success in the short term, but have also learned the skills to help them achieve long term success.

Janet Williams, part of that first cohort, said she lost about 17 pounds over 22 weeks, and still uses some of the techniques she learned in the study to help maintain her weight, which has not fluctuated.

"The program doesn't just help you identify when you eat," said Williams. "It helps you recognize triggers that make you eat, to help you break that cycle of reaching for food every time you feel bored, or frustrated, or sad."

Williams said that the program teaches various techniques to help break that cycle, such as the "conveyor belt," in which participants, when overcome with a specific emotion, can recognize it and take a step back, before reaching for chips or cookies, and put those feelings on their mental "conveyor belt" and watch them go away.

"I still use the skills I learned in the study," she said. "I've learned to say, 'I will not allow this emotional episode to control my eating habits.'"

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¹Temple University. http://www.temple.edu/

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If you are considering weight loss surgery, you owe it to yourself to choose a physician who is not only highly skilled, but caring and compassionate as well. Many physicians out there will treat your obesity. Dr. Waggoner will treat you!

To contact us for more information and/or to reserve your seat for the next free seminar, please click here.

"Mental Budgets" Help Control Consumption

If you feel like you're in a losing battle with a triple-chocolate cake, a "mental budget" can help, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"There are some behaviors that consumers try to limit but have trouble doing so," write authors Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy (University of Houston) and Sonja Prokopec (ESSEC Business School, France). "Even as one aims to curtail consumption of sugars and fat, one ends up consuming the tiramisu or the triple-chocolate cake. Such discrepancies between one's goals and actual behaviors represent instances of self-control failure."

Overconsumption is a serious issue in the United States. For example, National Institutes of Health statistics show that two-thirds of American adults are overweight, with associated direct economic medical costs of $78.5 billion each year. About 70 million Americans are attempting to control their food intake.

So, how do consumers rein in overeating? In weight-loss systems like Weight Watchers^®, each food is assigned a point value and members are encouraged to limit their total daily consumption to a pre-specified amount of points.

The authors conducted several studies where they encouraged some participants to set mental budgets and compared them to people who did not set budgets. They examined their consumption of sweet treats.

They discovered several patterns. First, having a mental budget alone was not sufficient. Participants also needed to have an active goal of not wanting to consume sweets. Second, the information about the products needed to match the units of the mental budgets. Third, mental budgets succeeded when consumers followed specific numerical recommendations, like the Weight Watchers^® points.

"For those who wish to cut out those desserts, our research suggests some simple tips," the authors write. "First, it is important to have a mental budget. At the very least, it allows you to keep track of how you are doing with respect to your goal. Second, make sure the budget works as a limit rather than a license for the consumption behavior. To do this, it is important to have an active goal of controlling the consumption."

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¹Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy and Sonja Prokopec. "Resisting That Triple-Chocolate Cake: Mental Budgets and Self-Control." Journal of Consumer Research: June 2010. A preprint of this article (to be officially published online soon) can be found at http://journals.uchicago.edu/jcr.

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If you are considering weight loss surgery, you owe it to yourself to choose a physician who is not only highly skilled, but caring and compassionate as well. Many physicians out there will treat your obesity. Dr. Waggoner will treat you!

Contact Bradley Waggoner, MD:

• If you are ready to set-up an appoint to discuss your weight loss options.
• Reserve your seat at the next free seminar on Lap-Band Surgery and meet Bradley Waggoner in person.

If you'd like to set-up an appointment to further discuss your weight loss surgical options, please contact us.

Emotional Check-up Just as Important as a Physical

If you are considering Gastric Bypass or LAP-BAND System surgery, there are a variety of levels on which you need to gauge your readiness level. By now, if you've been honest with yourself, you've probably figured out how you got to be be in your physical predicament. What are the triggers that cause you to overeat? Have you come up with a plan that will replace food with a healthy substitute when those triggers arise post surgery?

"The problem is that many people who have surgery haven't been in therapy to address the issues behind their eating disorder," says Kathryn Friedman Sloan, a licensed mental-health counselor in Palm Beach Gardens. "Most of them are emotional eaters, and when you take that away, they're left with 'what do I do with my emotions?"¹

Although it may not be possible to solve all your emotional issues prior to having bariatric surgery due to life threatening physical health problems, you do need to be prepared to deal with leftover issues as well as new emotional hurdles that may appear post surgery.

Attend one of our free seminars for LAP-BAND surgery and talk with others who have been in your shoes prior to bariatric surgery and who are continuing to deal with their food addictions to get the moral support you need.

Dr. Bradley Waggoner will also be available to field your questions about LAP-BAND System surgery and to direct you to additional support systems that will be of help to you and if needed, give you references to reputable psychological counselors who can help prepare you as you move toward a healthier mind and body.

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¹ Aetna InteliHealth/Health News. November 28, 2006 "Overeating Replaced With Other Compulsive Behaviors" Cox News 2006 <http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/333/8014/510565.html>