From the Journal of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics press release via AlphaGalileo:
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.