Combination of psychotherapy with DC may improve eating disorder psychopathology, body weight

May 27 2013

The combination of psychotherapy with dietary
 counseling (DC) might be a potential useful strategy to improve both eating disorder psychopathology and body weight in patients with BED.

Recent research 
seems to support a model of binge eating that includes emotional vulnerability
 and a deficit of skills that functionally modulate negative emotions, a
 mechanism not directly addressed by both cognitive behavior and interpersonal
 psychotherapy.

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is a psychological treatment
 designed to address the cognitive and interpersonal experiential perspective of 
emotions.

We report the results of a naturalistic study that evaluated the
effect of EFT, DC to reduce the consumption of energy-dense food, and combined
 treatment (CT) in treatment-seeking patients with BED and obesity. 189 patients
 who met DSM-IV research criteria for BED were included in the study.
 Participants received EFT administered via 20 group sessions. A proportion of 
cases between 44.4% and 74.6% achieved the 5% weight loss target by the end of
 treatment, depending on the type of treatment. CT was superior to other
 treatments.

At the 6-month follow-up, EFT, either alone or in combination with
 DC, significantly increased the outcome rate.

From a clinical point of view, our 
results show that EFT, a psychotherapy focused on the cognitive and
 interpersonal experiential perspectives of emotions associated with DC,
produces promising results on binge eating remission, weight loss, binge eating
 behavior and health-related quality of life in treatment-seeking BED patients
 with obesity.

The data also suggest that the combination of EFT and DC might be
 a promising strategy to produce both an improvement of the eating disorder 
psychopathology and a healthy amount of weight loss.