A New Begining - Research Paper Example

A group of 10 is a good sized group and will be able to be managed within a short amount of time. We will have the initial screening through doctors, but we will also provide a short questionnaire for anyone who is interested in the group. The questionnaire will ask about their attitude towards weight loss, what they have tried in the past, how often they have tried to lose weight, and what results they had in the past. The questionnaire will also ask screening questions that will pertain to whether an individual has problems with eating disorders.

In order for someone to be successful in weight loss, they will need to make a variety of changes with not only their eating habits but with their mental ideas about food. In order to lose weight, they may need to undergo a complete change in their lifestyle. This is one of the reason why it will be important to define those people who actually have a mindset that will promote their moving forward. Each person in the group will also need to go through one individual therapy session with one of the group members.

This will create a psychological profile for each person so that we know what we are dealing with when people come into the group. According to Berg, Landreth and Fall (2006) we should screen participants so that the members of the group have similar goals and needs for weight loss, and they would be people who would not stop the progress of the group. When thinking about this criteria, we would want to make sure that the members of the group were mentally healthy (they do not have psychological disorders that would stop the progress of the group), and who were at a similar level of needing to loose weight.

In other words, we would like to have people in the group who are serious about weight loss and who will do what is required. Some of this would be done in the prescreening which would include an interview with each individual who was interested in the group, the questionnaire, and a conversation with their doctor (with a written permission from the person wanting to join the group). Since Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is supposed to be brief therapy, we will limit the group to 12 sessions of 45 minutes each and we will meet at the treatment center.

Rationale for CBT CBT has been used to assist many people in stopping smoking, turning away from alcohol and drugs, as well as stopping many mood disorders. Using CBT for weight loss is relatively new, according to St. Clair (n.d.). Losing weight involves not only a physical change, but individuals must also change their thinking. CBT is able to help them make new decisions about the way they look, about weight loss in general and they learn to think thin (St. Clair, n.d.). Arhart-Treichel (2007) reports on a study done by the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research in which ten women were a part of a weight loss group.

The results of the study showed that the women lost a pound a month to a pound a week and were able to keep it off. A Swedish randomized clinical trial done in 2005 studied 62 obese people who lost an average of 17 pounds after the 10 weeks program and another five pounds by the follow-up date 18 months later (Arhart-Treichel, 2007). Clearly, CBT is slowly showing an effective way