LighterLife Weight Loss Counselling

By Dietitian, Juliette Kellow BSc RD

Tell me more about the counselling

All the LighterLife counsellors are qualified and hold the BTEC Professional Certificate and Diploma in Operating a Weight Management Consultancy. The groups are single sex and include between seven and 12 people. After the first couple of weeks, no one else is allowed to join your group. The counsellors use a combination of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and transactional analysis (TA) to help people understand the reasons why they eat.

What exactly is cognitive behavioural therapy?

CBT is used to treat emotional and behavioural problems, including depression, panic attacks, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, chronic anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, substance abuse, low self esteem and poor coping skills. But it’s also been found to be useful for treating obesity and eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

CBT combines cognitive therapy and behaviour therapy. Cognitive therapy teaches you how certain ‘thinking patterns’ cause symptoms by giving you a distorted picture of what’s happening. Meanwhile, behaviour therapy helps you weaken the connections between difficult situations and your habitual reactions to them. It also teaches you how to calm your mind so you feel better, think more clearly and make better decisions. When combined in CBT, these two therapies provide powerful tools for stopping symptoms and getting your life back on a more satisfying track.

How about transactional analysis?

TA is a therapy that helps people break patterns they may have had since childhood, which influence their behaviour and interactions with other people, sometimes in a dysfunctional or destructive way. TA focuses on helping people to solve problems, make new choices and achieve goals. Ultimately, it helps people to adjust their behaviour in a way that makes them feel better about themselves.