Therapy overweight

The modern therapeutic approach to treating obesity must take into account today’s knowledge of this disorder. It is simply not enough to forbid an obese patient to eat and to scare him with stories of high blood pressure and heart attacks. Today’s therapy should be carried out in different stages, which ideally build on each other.

Informing the patient about the causes of his disorder
Realistic goals
Eating habits
Eating habits
Movement

Reconnaissance

Most obese (overweight) people carry a picture of themselves and their disorder around with them, in which they usually see themselves as the culprits for their disorder. However, as mentioned above, this is by no means entirely true. Of course, it is not at all beneficial if a patient eats only junk food and avoids any kind of exercise, but it is just as wrong to label an overweight person per se as a lazy glutton.

The truth lies (as so often in our beautiful world, which is neither completely black nor completely white) in the middle. The therapist’s task is to explain the whole range of causes to the patient in order to work on his attitude towards himself.The message here should be that much of what constitutes obesity (being overweight) is not the fault of the individual, but that this fate is by no means something one simply has to accept. Most obese patients who come to such a therapy have already been through a number of failed diets and have therefore often left the mark of failure on themselves. By the honest and scientific clearing-up over the disturbance it should succeed now a reorientation to cause and a new motivation thrust to give.

Realistic goals

If the patient has developed a motivation for a therapy through this first step, the next step is to determine the goals of the therapy. Unfortunately, motivation or overmotivation often leads to the patient setting unattainable goals, which will almost certainly fail. (e.g. the weight reduction from 120 to 70 kg within half a year)Such a failure can now destroy the newly created motivation and finally lead to an increase in weight (black and white thinking) by completely abandoning the attempt of weight reduction. With regard to the target weight, there are guideline values which assume that it is reasonable to reduce the initial weight by about 15%.