Fundamentals of Weight Management CBT Essentials for Weight Management Your Brain and Appetite Conditioned Overeating
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CBT Essentials for Weight Management.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was developed by Psychiatrist Dr. Aaron Beck in the 1960s as a conceptual model for Depression. He noticed that the prominent theme for patient who struggled with depression was that they would commonly have a stream of distorted thoughts that fell into three categories: negative thoughts about themselves, the world/experience, or the future. He coined these terms ‘automatic thoughts’ and postulated that they led to negative emotions and dysfunctional behaviour.

 
 

Your Brain and Appetite.

Our brain was designed for the Hunter Gatherer. Our primate ancestors were meant to seek food and conserve energy in between hunts to be able to survive an impending famine. The obesity pandemic today can arguably be attributed to an evolutionary mismatch in which our primate brain, designed to hunt and conserve fuel, is faced with a society that is laden with hyperpalatable foods at every corner we turn. The brain dictates our behaviour and weight retention to help us with a famine that will never come! 

 
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Why We Overeat. 

Every time you activate the reward centre, the brain takes a snapshot of both internal and external cues. These cues might include stress, nighttime television, sitting in your car, or at your work desk, etc. With repeated pairing of a hyperpalatable food and these cues, your brain eventually learns that these are associated with pleasure; so all it takes is the presence of a cue that sprinkles a bit of dopamine on the nucleus accumbens, an area that is responsible for WANTING. These cues are what we call the High Risk Time – the time that you are at highest vulnerability of consuming unplanned calories due to wanting rather than hunger.