If you are seeking support with your nutrition and fitness goals from one of Revive Wellness’ dietitians, here are a few reasons that adding psychological services to your package can provide a significant boost to your success in achieving those goals:
1. Deeper Awareness of Food-Mood Connections:
A psychologist can help you build awareness about your relationship with food, emotions, life experiences, internal dialogue (self-talk), and patterns of behaviour. Some behaviours are sometimes part of a coping pattern that can run interference with your nutrition and fitness goals. Greater awareness of food-mood connections can be helpful to individuals who experience things like:
- Compulsions to binge
- A tendency to keep busy or distracted with things like work, sports, TV or various obligations
2. Shifting the Connections:
A psychologist can help you explore food-mood connections and work with them in ways that will increase the likelihood of meeting your nutrition and fitness goals. How?
- Food connects with some core ‘psychological’ themes relating to safety, survival, belonging, etc. A lot of eating behaviour has very deep emotional roots!
- Lasting change in a person’s relationship with food may require interventions at deeper levels than are accessible through strategies of behaviour modification. Psychological services can help a client ‘process’ those deeper levels, in addition to simply building awareness of them.
3. Supporting behaviour change:
A psychologist can help you explore any barriers to behaviour change, including barriers that involve significant others in your life:
- Sometimes, it is a simple matter of finetuning. Everything is going relatively well, but something isn’t quite working.
- A psychologist can support you in working with a relationship that is creating some kind of barrier in terms of your fitness and nutrition goals.
4. Clarifying and enhancing motivation:
A psychologist can help boost your motivation. If you’re someone who has worked really hard to meet your fitness and nutrition goals, but you feel stuck on a ‘plateau’, you may benefit from additional support.
Faye Gosnell, M.C., R Psych
Revive Wellness |My Viva Plan
