How a Registered Psychologist can Support Your Wellness Journey with a Revive Dietitian

When I first started at Revive, I would get phone calls from the dietitians who were curious about how to identify when my services might add value to their client’s wellness journey, and how to help their clients understand the potential benefits.

If you are seeking support with your nutrition and fitness goals from one of Revive Wellness’ dietitians, here are a few reasons that adding psychological services to your package can provide a significant boost to your success in achieving those goals:

1. Deeper Awareness of Food-Mood Connections:
A psychologist can help you build awareness about your relationship with food, emotions, life experiences, internal dialogue (self-talk), and patterns of behaviour. Some behaviours are sometimes part of a coping pattern that can run interference with your nutrition and fitness goals. Greater awareness of food-mood connections can be helpful to individuals who experience things like:

• Compulsions to binge
• A tendency to keep busy or distracted with things like work, sports, TV or various obligations

 

2. Shifting the Connections:
A psychologist can help you explore food-mood connections and work with them in ways that will increase the likelihood of meeting your nutrition and fitness goals. How?

• Food connects with some core ‘psychological’ themes relating to safety, survival, belonging, etc. A lot of eating behaviour has very deep emotional roots!
• Lasting change in a person’s relationship with food may require interventions at deeper levels than are accessible through strategies of behaviour modification. Psychological services can help a client ‘process’ those deeper levels, in addition to simply building awareness of them.

 

3. Supporting behaviour change:
A psychologist can help you explore any barriers to behaviour change, including barriers that involve significant others in your life:

• Sometimes, it is a simple matter of finetuning. Everything is going relatively well, but something isn’t quite working.
• A psychologist can support you in working with a relationship that is creating some kind of barrier in terms of your fitness and nutrition goals.

 

4. Clarifying and enhancing motivation:
A psychologist can help boost your motivation. If you’re someone who has worked really hard to meet your fitness and nutrition goals, but you feel stuck on a ‘plateau’, you may benefit from additional support.

 

 

Faye Gosnell, M.C., R Psych

Revive Wellness | My Viva Inc.