How emotional eating IOP can help long term success for Bariatric Surgery patients

When appropriate, Bariatric surgery is a great tool for achieving weight loss. But, we’ve all heard how so many have “put all that weight back on” after surgery.

If surgery is part of your weight-loss plan, you should also include an emotional eating program to achieve life long success. These programs look at the emotional barriers to losing weight. And it’s helpful to be looking at these before surgery so that you are set up for success. Then, the program continues post-surgery to make sure you continue to control your weight afterward.

At Healthy Futures, we offer an emotional eaters IOP, which is really designed for the person who’s really struggling with having a healthy relationship with food, body weight, and also really maybe struggling with taking off some weight and doing that successfully and healthfully at the same time.

It is actually for really looking at the emotional barriers to losing weight where we really look at what things are necessary to lifelong manage weight successfully and have a healthy relationship with food, body and weight.

In addition to being the director of Healthy Futures, I also consult at a local hospital where they do bariatric surgery. One of the things that our emotional eaters program is really helpful with is pre- and post-surgery success. It’s really helpful and vital to really look at the emotional aspects that underlie a weight problem. When they start to change some of those behaviors, they often realize some of those emotional components.

Our program is really designed for those going into surgery and really looking at things pre-surgery so that they set themselves up for success, and then coming here afterwards and making sure they continue their success.

I find surgery really a helpful way to get weight off, especially when there’s medical issues or a great functionality issue with people’s knees or other orthopedic issues. I think weight loss surgery is really essential, but without doing the emotional work, I think it only is a tool that goes so far.

There’s also a lot of people out there that say, “Oh, that won’t work. I know such and such and they gained all the weight back.” I have known those people.

The people that I really see succeed are those that went to a counselor or did a program such as ours, continued in support groups. I really find that those people are really successful and are successful most of the time. Really encouraging people to do that underlying emotional is really helpful to ensure success.