Psychological therapy · Online across the UK
Psychological therapy around weight and eating
This is not a weight-loss programme. There are no plans, no targets, no numbers, and no advice about what to eat.
What it is: psychological work on the patterns underneath — the eating that happens when you didn't decide to eat, the cycle of restriction and rebound, the relationship with your body that shapes everything else, and the reasons change tends not to hold.
I've spent twelve years working in NHS weight management services alongside my eating disorder work. What that taught me, mostly, is that people arriving at those services already know what they're supposed to eat. Knowledge is very rarely the missing piece.
What I work with
What I work with
- Eating in response to emotion rather than hunger
- Binge eating and the cycles surrounding it
- Restriction followed by rebound, and the pattern repeating
- Body image difficulties and body-related shame
- Weight-related distress, including experiences of stigma
- Psychological preparation for, or adjustment after, bariatric surgery
- Difficulty sustaining change that's been achieved before
Why this work
Why knowing what to do isn't enough
Almost everyone who comes to this work has done it before. Often several times, sometimes with real success, and then the pattern reasserts itself and the explanation people reach for is that they lack discipline.
That explanation is nearly always wrong, and believing it makes things worse. Eating patterns are held in place by mechanisms — emotional regulation, reward, habit, shame, the specific way that restriction primes bingeing. Mechanisms don't respond to willpower. They respond to being understood and worked with.
Which is what psychological therapy is for, and why it addresses something a diet plan structurally cannot.
How I work
Assessment first, then the work
Assessment first, one to two sessions, building a picture of what the pattern is doing and what keeps it there.
Then work drawn from CBT-E, compassion-focused therapy and Schema Therapy depending on what the assessment found. Where shame is prominent — and with weight it usually is — compassion-focused work tends to do more than anything else, because self-criticism is often the engine rather than the brake.
Sessions are one hour, by video, weekly to begin with.
Outcomes
On weight as an outcome
I don't set weight targets and I don't track weight as a measure of whether therapy is working.
That isn't evasion. It's that weight is a poor proxy for the things this work actually changes: whether eating feels within your control, whether food occupies less of your thinking, whether shame has loosened, whether change holds this time. Those are measurable, and they're the ones that matter.
Some people's weight changes over the course of this work. Some people's doesn't. Both can be good outcomes.
Scope
Whether this is the right service
I work with adults, online, across the UK.
If your difficulty is primarily a restrictive eating disorder, the eating disorders page is the better starting point — there's overlap between these areas, but the work differs. If you need medical weight management, dietetic input, or a multidisciplinary team, private psychological therapy isn't a substitute and I'd say so at assessment.
I ask that you're registered with a GP. This isn't a crisis service; if you need help urgently, contact your GP, NHS 111, or attend A&E.
Get in touch
A few lines about what's going on is enough. I'll reply personally within three working days.