Doc wants you to lose weight but the pounds aren’t coming off?
Level 1: The Basics
It’s not enough to have a diet recommended to you or to have a list of foods to eat and not to eat. That’s not enough to truly help if you want lasting results. Here’s what we think: Similar to becoming really good in a sport or learning to play an instrument well, Willpwr+ EE starts you off with the basics:
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Manage your food environment before you try to change yourself.
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Re-learn how to tell when you are physically hungry
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Learn how to listen to your body when you’ve had enough. The challenge is that if you are overweight and have been so for at least several months, your body is probably not sending you accurate signals of hunger or satiety anymore. Largely controlled by hormones, those signals get distorted with being overweight, making it harder to read your own biological signals! We help you re-tune. Nobody gets it 100% but most of us can make real improvements with practice.
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Improve self-control skills. You need them during a transition period as you break old habits but haven’t yet established healthy habits as a new behavior.
Level 2: Techniques to modulate emotions and to improve self-esteem.
Since much of overeating is about responding to stress, fatigue, and various mood states, we give you training in techniques to respond to emotions in productive ways without using food unless you truly need the energy. We show you techniques like reframing, mindfulness, and cognitive restructuring, and “de-fanging” or mindful awareness to deal with emotionally driven eating. We also ask you a few questions each day about your moment-to-moment mood state so that we can give more accurate advice as you progress. We spend a lot of time helping you with self-esteem issues as well -- a neglected topic but one that bothers almost every overweight person out there.
Level 3: Learning your triggers
Urges have triggers that cause them. We help you discover your triggers and show you what to do in response to them. There are environmental triggers like the sight or smell of food. There are several mood states, mostly uncomfortable ones, including sadness, anxiety, anger, boredom. We have advice for each of them. We even have advice for how to handle the fear of wasting food.
Level 4. New Eating Patterns based on Circadian Rhythms and periods of discontinuous eating
In the past few years, there has been a lot of excitement about learning when to eat as well as what to eat. Two lines of evidence suggest this as a promising way to manage weight: We need periods of not eating in order to tap into stored fat, and our body's ability to manage energy varies in predictable ways within a 24-hour period. From these observations eating patterns such as TIme Restricted Eating and Intermittent Fasting have been constructed. They aren’t for everybody, but for those interested, we review all the information and suggest ways of making these types of new eating programs work for you.
Level 5. Maintenance. Strengthening what you’ve learned. Keeping it going.
Our Eating app from day 1 emphasizes that success is based on changing eating habits permanently. That calls for commitment and training. You need to be in this for the long haul to protect and improve your health. If you bought this app to drop 20 pounds to get into some fancy clothes for Aunt Sally’s wedding, you bought the wrong app. So we have a variety of strategies within the app to help you maintain and strengthen your gains and to encourage you to go slowly. Rapid weight loss almost always spells disaster. There are over 50 videos. There are ways to encourage yourself through messages to yourself, through music, through spiritual and religious sayings. In short, we’ve provided our users with every possible ability that a smartphone can offer.
Needless to say, throughout every level, the app is measuring things, collecting information about patterns, offering you more and more sophisticated advice based on your own patterns and moods. Using the dashboard to see what the app is finding out should be extremely helpful. If you are working with a dietitian, a physician, or a therapist, the dashboard might be extremely helpful as well. We’ll keep working to continually refine our information and to stay at the cutting edge of help for you. That’s our guarantee.