Changing Your Child’s Life

The Weight Control Challenge

Being overweight can lead to health risks and conditions in almost every part of the body. Some well known examples are metabolic such as diabetes, as well as cardiovascular, orthopedic, gastrointestinal, and respiratory. Losing less than just 10% of one’s body weight can yield positive health effects. So, if your child weighs 180 lbs., losing just 18 lbs. can have physical and emotional benefits. Whether Wellspring Texas is the right choice for your child this summer, being overweight – particularly as a teen – is something that must be taken very seriously.

Wellspring understands that weight loss and long-term weight control are a difficult challenge and that many factors conspire to frustrate successful weight control. Not only do we live in an “obesogenic” society where a sedentary lifestyle and poor food choices are the norm, but we also live in a society that discriminates against those that are overweight.

Overweight adolescents often face social hardships that others don’t face. Most overweight teens share the experience of being picked on in an athletic setting or feeling discouraged that certain styles of clothes don’t fit them. These experiences can have a significant effect.

The Solution: Behavioral Change

Wellspring is based on years of scientific research.  Research shows that the only path to successful long-term weight control is changing one’s lifestyle. “Weight loss” regiments or diets are not successful in the long run. Education, training, and a new set of behaviors and skills are effective. Wellspring’s clinical program utilizes cognitive-behavioral therapy, dietary therapy, and physical activity to create a new focus on and commitment to these core behaviors necessary to become successful long-term weight controllers (LTWC’s).

Clinical Program

Wellspring knows that long-term weight control is a manageable athletic challenge. In other words, if someone is a serious athlete, there are several factors in their lifestyle that they must consistently stick to. A serious athlete probably keeps a log of progress, thinks about the foods he or she is ingesting, sets goals, discusses progress and strategies with others, and adjusts daily routines accordingly. He or she is probably very focused on overall health in order to perform at the highest possible level. Successful weight control requires the same level of focus.

The bottom line is that if weight control were easy, 1/3 of American children and adolescents would not be overweight or obese.

Campers are trained on a set of behaviors that have been proven to produce and maintain significant weight loss. Self-monitoring, journaling, goal-setting, and contracting become habitual to campers and when integrated with the nutrition and culinary training, success is attainable.

This training is led by each camper’s Behavioral Coach (Masters- or Doctoral- level psychologists or social workers). Behavioral Coaches (BC’s) lead the camper along the journey to success while working together to overcome any barriers preventing successful long-term weight control.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) sessions in individual and group settings strengthen this training. Campers learn to apply the knowledge and behaviors to challenges in their own lives, and improve frustration tolerance and stress management skills.

In these ways, CBT helps overweight teens effectively manage their weight and overcome barriers to successful weight control. Campers become self-regulators who can set realistic, achievable goals and stay committed to health and long-term weight control while managing the stress that we all face in daily life.

A group CBT session at Wellspring generally operates as follows:

  • Summary of each student’s progress since the last meeting
  • Discussion of a CBT/weight control topic such as coping mechanisms
  • Reading Assignment
  • Goal setting and behavioral contracts

Individual sessions are similar in that they review achievement but focus on the details of each student’s self-monitoring, barriers to success and how to achieve short- and long-term goals.

CBT employs goal-setting, stimulus control decision counseling, relapse prevention training, rational emotive therapy, positive focusing, improving frustration tolerance, and stress management. Some campers adopt these new behaviors easily while others have emotional issues to overcome before they can be entirely successful. (Obese people are 25-44% more likely to suffer from clinical depression than people of a normal weight- Archives of General Psychiatry, July 2006.) CBT is the key to successful long-term weight control, which leads to heightened self-esteem, improved mood and outlook, and an increase in energy level.

Wellspring Texas BCs are Masters- or Doctoral-level clinicians under the direct supervision of Daniel Kirschenbaum, Ph.D. A professor at Northwestern University Medical School, Dr. Kirschenbaum is a leading expert on weight control. To read more about his work, click here.

In addition to improvements in overall health and mental well-being, lasting results are achieved at Wellspring. Let Wellspring change your life.