Diet Rescue in the media spotlight
Excerpts from a recent interview with Penny Stevens, founder of Diet Rescue
by Stuart Pate of “the best of kettering”
S: What do you think accounts for the success phenomenon of Diet Rescue?
P: I think it’s that more and more people are realising that losing weight is not about “going on a diet”; that it’s about getting the mind and body to work together. Estimates from research indicate that up to 98% of people who go on a diet will “fail” and often end up putting on more weight. This can then lead people to the “yo-yo” dieting situation as they struggle with new diet after new diet in their attempts to find a diet that will enable them to lose weight permanently.
Paul McKenna has brought to public attention the importance of the part that the mind plays in dictating our behaviour in the form of habits, associations and emotional factors, all learned at an early age, and how we therefore need to “reprogramme” and update our minds so that they don’t “sabotage” our efforts to lose weight.
S: Paul McKenna uses NLP and hypnosis to help people to reprogramme their minds. what approach does Diet Rescue use?
P: At Diet Rescue cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is the favoured approach. CBT has increasingly been recognised as highly successful in helping people to lose weight permanently. It is widely used in the NHS because of its excellent and rapid results. Problems like overeating can usually be addressed in just a few session, and once the changes are put into practice they can last a lifetime. This is because CBT provides people with both an understanding of how their minds work and also the knowledge of how to make the changes they need to make. This means that they have the opportunity to apply these whenever they may need to, whatever the problem might be – it’s not just for weight loss; CBT can be used to address a very wide range of problems that we may encounter; this is one of the many advantages of CBT.
S: Could you explain a little more about CBT?
P: CBT looks at the relationship between thoughts, emotions and behaviour, all of which are interlinked and constantly interacting and influencing each other, although we are generally mostly unaware of this going on. CBT brings awareness of this to a conscious level which means that we can begin to interrupt the established pathways in the mind and develop new pathways. Over recent years technology has enabled the tracing of the neural pathways and there is now clear evidence that new neural pathways can be established, leading to changes in associations and habit based behaviour.
S: What is it like to experience CBT?
P: Another of CBT’s strengths is that it is very user-friendly. It is a collaborative therapy – working together, looking at how the mind is influencing the behaviour and then moving on to the practical steps to make the changes that will lead to the outcome that the client has defined. One of the important philosophies of cbt is that it s purpose is to enable and empower people by “giving away” the knowledge of how the mind works and the effective strategies for making changes.
S: So to sum it up?
P: The strength and appeal of diet rescue are that it offers people a real opportunity to lose weight permanently using a tried and tested user-friendly approach which provides them with a multi-use take-away toolkit! and you don’t need to go through the frustrations of dieting!