Obesity

According to the weight management literature, the fifth leading risk factor for worldwide death is caused by being overweight and obesity. Each year, approximately 3 million fatalities occur from adult obesity.

Exogenous Obesity: Exogenous obesity has a psychological or emotional origin. Currently, it is the form of obesity that primarily arises due to excessive consumption of food, certain eating habits and/or undiagnosed eating disorders such as hyperphagia or binge-eating disorder. It is also associated with affective mood disorders such as anxiety and depression.

When addressing exogenous obesity, it is necessary to refer to the Eating Disorders (ED) which present serious problems between client and food. Among the most common ED’s:

• Binge Eating Disorder– person can ingest large quantities of food in a short period of time.
• Hyperphagia– an excessive intake as a reaction to stressful situations.
• Nocturnal Eating Syndrome– food intake at night or by excessive consumption of food after dinner.

Therapeutic Objectives of Working with Obesity

Therapy for obesity concentrates on those experiences of attachment or of traumatic events where the client learned to manage their emotional discomfort through the overuse of food consumption. The objective is to understand the effects of these harmful life experiences, in order to treat a disease classified as chronic, in efforts to provide multiple possibilities for improvement.