Lifestyle Change for Weight Loss:
Wellspring’s Clinical Program
Wellspring Vancouver is based on years of scientific research that shows the only path to successful long-term weight control is changing one’s lifestyle. Your child has likely already experienced failed weight loss efforts and the heartbreak that ensues. The reason your child was not successful is because weight loss is only effective if integrated into a comprehensive program that addresses diet, activity, and your child’s thoughts and habits surrounding weight loss and self-image.
At all Wellspring Camps, we boast an intensive and coordinated program of educating, training, and equipping campers with a new set of behaviors and skills for successful weight control, combined with rapid weight loss to boost motivation and commitment. Wellspring’s clinical program utilizes cognitive-behavioral therapy, dietary therapy, and physical activity to create a new focus on these core behaviors and engender the commitment to them in your child. The result—lasting weight loss success and a healthier, happier child!
Risks and Frustrations of Excess Weight
Whether or not Wellspring Vancouver is the right choice for your child this summer, being overweight – particularly as a teen – is something that should be taken very seriously.
At Wellspring, we are committed to long-term weight loss because our extensive research has validated that being overweight can lead to health risks and conditions in almost every part of the body, including many forms of cancer, diabetes, asthma, coronary heart disease, and stroke. Of course, the effects of excess weight in children and teens are more than physical, as you have probably already noticed in your child. Many families recognize their child’s unhappiness, negative outlook, and low self-esteem are connected to overweight or obesity.
In fact, the physical, emotional, social, and financial effects of weight are numerous, but rarely understood.
But there is good news: Losing just 10% of one’s body weight can yield significant positive health effects. So, if your child weighs 180 lbs., losing just 18 lbs. can have physical and emotional benefits. This helps explain the popularity of teen diets, and traditional weight loss camps and fat camps despite the fact that the results are almost always temporary. At Wellspring, campers benefit from rapid weight loss while at camp, as well as the life-changing effects of long-term weight loss.
Wellspring understands that achieving weight loss and long-term weight control are difficult challenges at any age. Many factors conspire to frustrate successful weight control—including the glorification of high-fat, unhealthy foods in media and pop culture, discrimination against overweight individuals, and enormous pressure placed on kids to look, dress and act in certain ways.
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 when certain styles of clothes don’t fit them. These experiences can have a significant effect on emotional health.
And unfortunately, weight control is not easy. If it were, 1/3 of American children and adolescents would not be overweight or obese.
The Solution: Changing Behavior to Change Lives
Clinical Program
Wellspring has chosen Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as our method of choice for helping campers achieve the behavioral changes necessary for long-term weight control. Research indicates that CBT is extremely effective in equipping individuals with the tools they need for long-term weight loss (American Psychological Association, 2009). CBT is an active, practical form of therapy that helps campers understand their impulses and decisions, meet challenges with less frustration, and monitor their thoughts and feelings—skills that are useful in many areas of life!
Self-monitoring, journaling, goal-setting, and contracting become habitual to campers and success is attainable when these tools are integrated with the low fat nutrition and culinary training.
What does an actual CBT Session involve? Wellspring Campers work in both group and individual settings with their assigned Behavioral Coach (BC). Wellspring Vancouver BCs are Masters- or Doctoral-level psychologists or social workers and work with each camper to help foster an environment of success and mutual achievement. Campers learn to apply the knowledge and behaviors to challenges in their own lives, and improve frustration tolerance and stress management skills.
A group CBT session at Wellspring generally operates as follows:
- Summary of each student’s progress since the last meeting
- Discussion of a therapeutic or 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, along with frustration tolerance and stress management improvement techniques. 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.
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.
Wellspring Vancouver BCs are Masters- or Doctoral-level clinicians under the direct supervision of Daniel Kirschenbaum, Ph.D., a professor at Northwestern University Medical School and a leading expert on weight control.
To read more about Dr. Kirschenbaum’s work, click here.
Wellspring Vancouver campers achieve lasting results in physical and emotional health, and improve their overall well-being over summer, and in the following months back home as they continue their journey towards a healthy weight. Let Wellspring Vancouver change your child’s life this summer.
