Changing Your Child’s Life
Weight issues bring a heightened risk of physical, emotional, and social effects. Perhaps you are already noticing some changes in your child—low frustration tolerance, social isolation, or not performing up to his or her academic potential. Emotionally, many children struggle with depression, poor self-image, and negative outlook. In fact, one study showed that overweight individuals had an outlook even more negative than cancer patients. For many teens, failing to lose weight in previous programs can amplify their negative feelings. And studies show health risks of being overweight include many forms of cancer, diabetes, asthma, coronary heart disease, and stroke.
But here is the good news: Losing just 10% of one’s body weight can yield significant positive health and emotional effects. So, if your child weighs 81kg, losing just 8kg can have physical and emotional benefits.
The Wellspring Solution: Changing Behaviour to Change Lives
Wellspring Vancouver is based on years of scientific research that shows the only path to successful long-term weight control is changing one’s lifestyle. Weight loss regimens or diets are not successful in the long run. On the contrary, an intensive and coordinated program of education, skill-building, and behavioural training can lead to dramatic weight loss. Best of all, this success can break the downward cycle in which many overweight teens are currently trapped, showing them they can succeed at living a healthy lifestyle.
Wellspring Vancouver campers are trained on a set of behaviours that are proven to produce and maintain significant weight loss. Self-monitoring, journaling, goal-setting, and contracting become habitual to campers and success is attainable when these tools are integrated with Wellspring’s low-fat, low-density nutrition and culinary training.
Through group and individual sessions, Masters and Doctoral level Behavioural Coaches (BCs) enable campers to master the necessary behaviours to maintain a healthy lifestyle, while working together to overcome any barriers preventing successful long-term weight control. Campers learn to apply the knowledge and behaviours to challenges in their own lives, and improve frustration tolerance and stress management skills. Essentially, Wellspring Vancouver campers receive the same training and coaching that top athletes receive in order to maximize their performance. This is why we call our “trainers” Behavioural Coaches.
CBT employs goal-setting, stimulus control decision counseling, relapse prevention training, rational emotive therapy, positive focusing, along with frustration tolerance and stress management improvement techniques. Studies have shown that CBT is remarkably effective in helping individuals achieve successful long-term weight control.
In these ways, CBT helps overweight teens effectively manage their weight and overcome barriers to successful weight control. Campers become self-regulators who can set realistic, achievable goals and stay committed to health and long-term weight control while managing the stress that we all face in daily life.
A group CBT session at Wellspring generally operates as follows:
- Summary of each student’s progress since the last meeting
- Discussion of a therapeutic or weight control topic, such as coping mechanisms
- Reading assignment
- Goal setting and behavioural contracts
Individual sessions are similar in that they review achievement but focus on the details of each student’s self-monitoring, barriers to success and how to achieve short- and long-term goals.
Wellspring Vancouver BCs are Masters- or Doctoral-level clinicians under the supervision of licensed professionals, and hired and trained by Daniel Kirschenbaum, Ph.D., a professor at Northwestern University Medical School and a leading expert on weight control.
To read more about his work, click here.
