For those professionals who will be attending my workshop here is your pre-reading material. These are seminal papers in the psychology of weight loss field.

1) Westenhoefer, Behavioural Correlates of weight loss maintenance – This comes from the Lean Habits Study which is one of the rare, long term studies that looks at what counts when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off. The  key finding for me was that ‘flexible control’ – as opposed to ‘rigid control’ – correlated with weight loss maintenance at three years, whereas ‘rigid control’ did not. Rigid control ‘includes attempts to totally avoid sweets or other favourite foods’ while trying to lose weight. In many ways, my work is all about clinically operationalising ‘flexible control’.

2) Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we Diet – This classic paper is all about Restraint Theory and how it applies to the ‘Last Supper Effect’.

OPTIONAL READING

3) Kumanyika, Maintenance of dietary change – this paper concludes that education will change what people eat, but this does not translate to decreasing caloric intake! And then when it gets hard to work out (e.g. how much salt or fat there is in processed foods) it will depend on motivation as to what changes. In short managing our weigth is about motivation, not education.

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