Treat Yourself Well
- Clinic Name
- Treat Yourself Well
- Website
- http://www.treatyourselfwell.com.au/
- Phone
- (02) 9555 4810
- Fax
- (02) 9555 4850
In 2006, we began developing Treat Yourself Well online. Our vision was to create the best online health and wellness program possible, based on scientific research on 'what works' to achieve lifelong lifestyle change.
We wanted to help people, and we knew that dieting wasn’t the path to wellness. Day after day, we saw clients in despair after 'falling off the dieting wagon' and blaming themselves for their 'failure'. We saw that dieting made people obsessed with food, caused them to binge, ruined their sense of self-worth, increased body image problems, and really screwed up their relationship with food and exercise. And we saw that no matter how hard people tried, they kept regaining the weight. And no alternatives were available.
The weight loss industry, big pharmaceutical companies, food companies, and many obesity researchers have a vested interest in keeping the diet message going, in spite of overwhelming evidence that it’s not only ineffective, it’s doing harm. We wanted to change this. As clinical psychologists, we are horrified at the weight loss industry for not telling people the truth about weight science and health. We hate how vulnerable people are being told to diet, over and over again, and then getting blamed for not succeeding at something with a 95% failure rate.
One of the driving forces behind Treat Yourself Well was to cut through the dieting pseudo-science, fads, and vested interests and to find the real principles behind long term health and wellness. Luckily, clinical psychologists are trained to read scientific research and to pick out the ‘good’ from the bad. In the field of weight science, there is a LOT of bad research. This is why it’s taken so long to make the program!
Over the course of several years, we came to understand the ‘big picture’ of weight science, in all of its glorious complexity. And we discovered that there was an effective alternative to dieting, an approach known as ‘non-dieting’, or Health At Every Size (HAES). We were inspired by the work of Dr Rick Kausman (If Not Dieting, Then What?), and Linda Bacon (Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight & Health). This approach emphasises letting go of diets and tuning in to the body’s natural hunger and fullness signals, developing intuitive eating habits, and essentially learning to trust your body. Research demonstrates that this approach results in better health and wellbeing than dieting. Importantly, it does NO damage to psychological or physical health. Not only does it not damage, it enhances peoples’ sense of self worth.
Mainstream diet approaches try to motivate people by making them feel ‘not good enough’ at their current size. But if this approach worked, there would be no big people! People struggling with their weight already feel terrible about it, and self hatred doesn’t help us to change. We knew there was a lot of evidence behind self compassion as one of the most powerful and long lasting motivators to self care, and we knew that the idea of kindness, acceptance and self compassion needed to be central to our approach.
And so Treat Yourself Well was born. It blends the very best, up to date science about weight and health with key psychological skills for compassion based self care. We hope you love it as much as we do.
Louise, Julie & the team at Treat Yourself Well Sydney xx
