Context:

At the National Center for Weight and Wellness, we view obesity and excess body weight as a complicated matter, potentially involving quite a range of factors in any given individual.  Because of this, your treatment plan must be custom built to address the factors specific to you.  Your treatment plan evolves over the course of treatment.  It becomes increasingly refined as we work together through ongoing consultations, classes and groups.

What is clearly common to all our new patients is that existing patterns of behavior have resulted in being overweight or obese.  The excess weight is a problem in many ways.  That is what brings you to us for treatment.

While we know your excess weight is a problem, we do not see your excess body weight as the problem.  Indeed for the purposes of your treatment with us, we want you to see your weight as the result of an underlying problem we will help you address. 

This underlying problem is your automatic biological and behavioral weight regulators do not hold you at a healthy weight.  Your excess weight is the result of this problem. 

We would like you to frame your work with us at NCWW in these terms.  We want to work with you to build a sustaining self-regulation of a healthy body weight.  That is how we see it.  Weight-loss is actually only a relatively small component of attaining that goal.  It is more of a by-product than the main target of building a sustaining self-regulation of weight.

Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is an activity of the self.  We self-regulate by choosing to exert a set of target behaviors that modify or change what our unregulated impulsive or patterned behaviors would otherwise be.  We self regulate to achieve an outcome by overriding our impulses and automatic patterns of behavior.  At NCWW, our mission is to partner with you to help you build a sustainable approach to the self-regulation of your body weight.  That is the outcome we target for our work with you.

Self-regulation has been studied by social and experimental psychologists over the past four decades. There is a vast literature spanning both self-regulation theory and self-regulation research.  You can read selected items from that literature as you explore these pages of the Treatment Issues website.  I think an intelligent approach would be to follow this brief introduction to self-regulation by first reading the page on self-regulation vocabulary.  Then I would suggest scrolling down  on this page  to the attachment entitled "Self regulation abstracts."  Click on that selection to get a sense of the scope of the articles on this page and the other sub-pages.  There are many possibilities.

Self-Regulation Conditions

Basically, what the literature tells us is that humans can indeed self-regulate given two conditions:

1. The person needs to know what to do: identifying, executing, monitoring and adjusting the target behaviors that yield self-regulation.

2. The person needs to have sufficient motivation: having the energy needed to exert the target behaviors in a manner that yields self-regulation.

These conditions are something rather easy to describe (and prescribe).  As you know, they are remarkably difficult to execute on a sustaining basis.

As you explore this important topic, you will find a great deal of information that helps illuminate why sustaining self-regulation is so difficult.  Happily, there is also a great deal of information on what to do to have the self-regulation of healthy body weight more sustainable.

Please note that both conditions above warrant considerable attention.  Identifying, monitoring and adjusting target behaviors is much of the focus of your individual consultations with the providers and dietitians at NCWW. It is also the subject of your nutrition and behavior classes.  Sustaining sufficient motivation  is much of what you work to attain through many of the psychological classes and groups.

"Sufficient" motivation implies that you need a certain amount of energy to select your target behaviors over the allure of other eating  urges - e.g. emotional eating; eating to support fat dependency; binge eating; food addiction; love of food.

Attachments:

A great foundation for beginning to appreciate the complexity of self-regulation can be gained by reading the attachment below entitled "Self-regulation failure.pdf".  It takes a long time to download this attachment because it was scanned, but it is well worth reading.  Also look at the sub-page on ego depletion for a lot of information on this important consideration.

You will find that the sub-page on motivation will be equally important, as it brings in wisdom from the field of self-determination theory to help us understand the complexity of sustaining motivation for self-regulation.

Looking through these self-regulation pages, you will find articles ranging in date from the 1990's to some currently "in press" manuscripts which have yet to be published.  Many of the articles which specifically target weight regulation and exercise enhancement are attached to the "Self-Regulation of Weight" sub page.