An Interview with Susan Borgman, LCSW, Clinical Director of Wellspring Academy in North Carolina.

A healthy diet and fitness plan are the basic necessities for weight loss. But eating less and moving more are not so simple when there are emotional barriers and self-defeating thoughts and behaviors standing in the way. Long-term studies have found that with most diets and weight loss programs, people return to their initial weight within three to five years. But some weight loss camps and boarding schools have achieved impressive, long-lasting results. What is their secret to long-term weight loss?

Today’s weight loss camps and schools achieve more remarkable results than their old-style “fat camp” counterparts and other weight loss programs largely because they utilize cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT. While fat camps sometimes report significant weight losses, statistics show only a very small percentage of campers are able to keep the weight off once they return home. Why? They haven’t confronted the underlying issues.

The basic premise of CBT is that we are in control of our thoughts and emotions, which means we can replace negative attitudes with new, healthy ways of thinking. Once we establish new patterns of thinking, a change of habits naturally follows. The main elements of CBT include becoming aware of your negative thoughts and poor self-image, learning how to handle stress, and getting adequate support from others.

Below is a discussion of some of the outdated approaches employed by “fat camps” and the cutting-edge ways modern weight loss camps and schools systematically and scientifically address the issues that contribute to overweight and obesity.

A Shift in Focus

At old-style “fat camps", a teen’s entire two or three month camp experience was designed for the sole purpose of maximizing weight loss. At today’s weight loss camps and schools, weight loss is about more than a shift in weight – it’s also a shift in thinking.

Unlike fat camps of the past, the modern weight loss camp or school is future-focused. “It’s not enough to lose weight. Our students also must learn how to keep it off,” says Susan Borgman, LCSW, Clinical Director of Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas, one of the first year-round boarding schools for overweight and obese children and adolescents. “We encourage teens to stay with us long enough to truly develop life-changing skills, not just lose 50 pounds in a few months.”

At Wellspring camps and academies, overweight youth learn to adopt the mentality of an elite athlete who has a “healthy obsession” with nutrition and fitness. “Shedding pounds is one of many goals, along with having more energy to concentrate in school, more flexibility to play sports, and more confidence to make friends and get involved in social activities,” Borgman explains.

When teens reach a plateau or lose motivation, modern weight loss camps and schools welcome the opportunity to teach teens to be honest with themselves about the areas in which they can do better. Since hurdles and dwindling motivation are certain to happen both at camp and at home, teens learn creative ways to reconnect with their goals and experiment with new weight loss strategies.

According to Borgman, weigh-ins can be a particularly emotional time for students. “The immediate reaction to weight gain or a plateau may be to give up or confirm negative thoughts like ‘I knew I couldn’t do it.’ With some guidance and stress tolerance skills, our students recognize that there will be bumps in the road, but they can regroup to achieve their goal the following week,” she says.

These skills carry over into every area of life, not just weight loss. In emotionally charged situations, people with stress tolerance skills can identify feelings of tension or anxiety and take a timeout to recover and steer back on course. “We all struggle with reaching our personal, career, and relationship goals, and we must find ways to keep ourselves on track,” Borgman states.

Modern weight loss camps and schools also challenge the way teens think about physical activity. Rather than spending hours doing boring “fat camp” routines in a gym, today’s weight loss camps and schools offer ropes courses, climbing walls, nature walks, kayaking, and every type of sport imaginable to show teens that physical activity can be a fun part of daily life.

Wellspring emphasizes walking, which can be done anywhere, and provides each student with a pedometer at the start of the program. “When teens see the number of steps adding up, they feel encouraged to keep up the good work and inspired to try new sports and activities,” says Borgman. “Many of our students realize they are actually quite talented athletically, and go on to try out for teams at home. They grow stronger knowing that they belong to something bigger than themselves.”

Taking Personal Responsibility

Teenagers often feel powerless to enact change in their lives, partly because their parents and teachers make most of their decisions for them. Since their existence is marked by carefully laid out rules and boundaries, teens often are in denial about their weight problem and blame others for their bad habits. While a fat camp may address these issues by taking away even more freedom, the best weight loss camps and schools work to strengthen each child’s self-image and sense of personal power.

“We believe teens can make a difference in their own lives if they take responsibility for their behaviors, both good and bad,” says Borgman. “If they’re going to lose weight, it’s up to them. Once they accept this responsibility, they can take credit for their accomplishments and feel confident in their ability to make positive changes.”

The first step in changing old habits is for teens to become aware of what those habits are and how they are affecting their lives. As part of the process of becoming self-aware, Wellspring asks each student to keep a daily self-monitoring journal. Self-monitoring involves being aware of food intake, exercise levels, and the emotions behind their actions. “At first, teens are reluctant to give up all of the comforts of home and live in a controlled environment where they must document every aspect of their diet,” Borgman states. “But soon, they realize they actually feel better about themselves physically and emotionally and have more energy. It begins to sink in that there is a better way.”

Taking personal responsibility for one’s own weight loss is also a metaphor for broader lifestyle change. Once teens realize they are accountable for their own behavior, they become empowered to regain control of their lives. “At Wellspring, we provide the tools students need to lose weight and get fit, but we also teach skills that make them more self-aware, not just of their calorie intake and fitness level, but also how monitoring their thoughts and emotions can help them live their best lives,” says Borgman.

Stopping Negative Self-Talk

Most overweight or obese individuals think disparaging thoughts or make derogatory comments to themselves, often without even realizing it. For some, negative self-talk such as “I’ll always be fat” or “It’s too hard to eat right” is based on automatic assumptions that consistently sabotage the person’s weight loss efforts.

At the modern weight loss camp, master’s and doctoral level therapists and social workers lead individual and group therapy sessions to help challenge teens’ negative thoughts. Unlike fat camps, these programs make cognitive-behavioral therapy a focal point of the process. Together, therapists and teens evaluate the chain of events that led to overeating or poor food choices. Rather than dwelling on mistakes, teens are encouraged to play out different choices and outcomes in their minds to determine which choice to make next time. For example, if a student consistently feels better when he walks 20,000 steps a day or feels worse when he eats too much, those mistakes can be avoided by remembering the negative outcomes and making different choices in the future.

“At Wellspring, students learn that there are many ways to live, so they must choose their own path,” says Borgman. “Do they want to live with obesity for the rest of their lives? Is that piece of cake or soda worth the disappointment and heartache that follows? By anticipating positive and negative outcomes, teens can replace self-defeating behaviors with self-affirming ones.” For instance, negative affirmations can be replaced with a new, encouraging internal dialogue such as “It won’t be easy, but I can do it.”

Although it can be a challenge for teenagers who are already struggling with raging hormones to control their thoughts and feelings, behavioral coaches at Wellspring help students see how changes in thoughts can lead to a change in lifestyle. “Thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions lead to actions,” advises Borgman. “By changing the thought processes, we can control the bingeing and emotional eating. That is the process of lifestyle change.”

Challenging Cognitive Distortions

Modern weight loss camps and schools use rational emotive therapy, a type of CBT, to help students re-evaluate how they interpret conflicts and issues. “Wellspring programs teach students to examine their beliefs and challenge any cognitive distortions,” Borgman explains. “For example, if someone did something a teen interpreted as purposefully cruel and hurtful, we challenge the teen to reassess the situation. Does that person really dislike you, or did you misinterpret the message? By refusing to let emotions take over and thinking through a situation logically, teens can make calm, rational decisions that serve them better in the long run.”

Peer groups are one of the most powerful influences on adolescents. Teens may not care about what parents or teachers think, but they obsess over what their friends or classmates think. “Because teens care so much about what other teens think, peer discussion groups can be an extremely powerful therapeutic tool,” notes Borgman. “Without offense or insult, other teens can challenge each other’s cognitive distortions. They can also lend unbiased opinions about what a fellow student could’ve done differently to get a different result.”

Social Support

Social support drastically increases a person’s chance of achieving lasting weight loss. When people feel isolated, alone, and misunderstood, they tend to rely more heavily on food as a companion.

One of the primary reasons for weight regain at old-style fat camps is that teens returned home to their bad habits and unstructured environment without learning the skills needed to maintain the weight losses. At Wellspring camps and academies, behavioral coaches speak with parents weekly to provide updates and prepare for home visits, to help parents set limits, and to get the whole family involved in the weight loss process. From day one of the program, parents receive books with shopping lists and healthy eating tips as well as pedometers to monitor their own activity levels.

“We teach families how to change the structure in the home so that students return to a different situation than the one they left,” advises Borgman. “Parents have made a substantial financial investment by choosing Wellspring camps or academies, and we want them to receive the best return on their investment.”

Long-term weight loss is as much about thinking thin as it is about looking thin. With the development of modern weight loss camps and boarding schools, children and teens have a unique opportunity to change bad habits and self-defeating thoughts and behaviors before they reach adulthood. Finding a weight loss program that not only helps you take the weight off, but also helps you keep it off can make all the difference.

Source: Wellspring Academy