Description
Date and Time: Thursday & Friday, 20th and 21st February 2025, 9.30am–4:00pm
Venue: The Gateway Centre, Chester St, Shrewsbury SY1 1NB
3 minutes walk from Shrewsbury station
Cost: £400 (includes lunch and refreshments)
The term health-gain was coined by the facilitator, dietitian Lucy Aphramor, to describe their approach, Well Now, and to differentiate the Well Now paradigm from both a weight-centric and a non-diet approach. ‘Health-gain’ is now popularly used to describe an approach to dietary counselling that focuses on improving overall wellbeing and that is seen as an alternative to a standard, weight-centric, approach.
This training introduces the theoretical basis of the health-gain approach Well Now and gives you the skills to start to implement it immediately. The focus is on making sense of underlying theory and translating this into hands-on practice.
The training is designed to enable health, counselling, and fitness professionals to get started with health-gain practice. Academics, educators, trade unionists, and policy makers will also find it relevant and are welcomed.
Day one presents biomedical and activist research that builds a case for using a health-gain approach, including research on compassion, acceptance, HAES, trauma, and the physiology of oppression. This research is often neglected in dietetic curricula, and often ignored in public health messages. We will consider and critique underpinning data and associated claims of health-gain and consider and critique the data and claims behind a weight-centric approach. By the end of the day learners will have sufficient information to assess the relative merits of different approaches to dietary counselling.
Day two focuses on putting health-gain theory into practice including how to respond to client expectations of a weight-centric model. Teaching is participatory and strongly informed by learner’s values and personal and professional experience. It models the process of supporting people to rethink assumptions about health, diet, BMI, and behaviours, and consider new framings that make sense of people’s relationship with food and health status. We will also discuss the implications of offering a health-gain approach within a department or professional body that endorses weight loss. The aim is that learners leave feeling confident they can get started with a health-gain approach and also that they feel equipped to foster generative conversations with curious andor sceptical colleagues.
By the end of the training learners will be able to
• Have improved critical thinking skills relevant to eating theories
• Know how to translate the theory of compassion into practice around eating
• Understand the key principles behind kindful eating and connected eating
• Know how to support clients when comfort eating becomes distress eating
• Know how to teach nutrition from a body aware perspective
• Understand how social factors are relevant to diet-related diseases and what this means in practice
• Have practised how to respond to people whose eating or weight has changed significantly eg due to Covid
• Identify how trauma impacts people’s eating
• Be able to suggest ways to evaluate practice outcomes.
• Bring a critical understanding to concepts including fat stigma, body image, thin privilege
• Initiate discussion of a health-gain approach with a client expecting a weight-centric approach
• Help people make sense of how diet, BMI, social factors, and behaviours interact to impact overall health
• Engage in conversation on body size/fatness using respectful language informed by activist perspectives
• Reflect on the relevance of the un/learning for their professional role.
