About Treating the Dieting Casualty 

At the heart of a good relationship with food is the principle of Eating Competence: Practical, reliable, joyful, food-neutral and weight-neutral eating that supports physical, nutritional, and emotional well-being. Dieting casualties experience the opposite of Eating Competence: They are trapped in the anguish and frustration of struggling with their eating and/or weight. Treating the Dieting Casualty is an in-depth workshop that trains you, the health/mental health professional, to help your patients become Eating Competent. You will learn the How to Eat method of assessment and treatment refined by Ellyn Satter in over 35 years of clinical practice and successfully applied by hundreds of professionals who have taken this workshop. While How to Eat carefully avoids doing psychotherapy, successful application profoundly impacts patients’ quality of life and emotional and physical well-being.

Learn how to help patients struggling with their weight

Dieting casualties simply do not know how to eat. They represent the extreme of today’s all-too-common struggle with what and how much to eat. They feel undeserving of eating pleasure and experience eating as unrelenting misery, conflict, and shame. They strive to live by the credo, “don’t eat so much; don’t eat the foods you like,” and may have repeatedly lost and regained weight. Dieting casualties are so insensitive to and mistrustful of their wants and needs with eating that they can only respond to extremes of hunger, food craving, and fullness. The dieting casualty might binge and starve, be rigidly picky, fail at following a therapeutic diet, or be obsessed with eating healthy food. While their struggle with eating plays a central role in life, they aren’t eating disordered.

• Individuals who successfully complete the How to Eat intervention gain Eating Competence: They are tuned in, orderly, relaxed, and positive about eating.
• How to Eat empowers patients to determine what and how much to eat based on internal regulators, stabilize body weight, and internalize weight-neutral approaches to weight issues.
• How to Eat can be used for doing medical nutrition therapy with patients suffering from medical conditions: Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal issues, weight acceleration and/or instability.
• How to Eat is not appropriate during the critical phase of anorexia nervosa. However, How to Eat may be used to establish Eating Competence for those who have recovered from the critical phase.

Objectives

Upon successful completion of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Understand and implement How to Eat by doing secondary intervention (detailed assessment and treatment) in addressing eating attitudes and behaviors, weight preoccupation, and activity.
• Cite literature addressing the theoretical underpinnings and evidence for the Satter Eating Competence Model and a weight-neutral approach to health.
• State the theoretical basis of treatment.
• Consider the childhood antecedents of compromised Eating Competence in assessment and treatment.
• Differentiate among providing education and doing treatment in addressing child feeding problems, as well as know how to avoid straying into doing psychotherapy.
• Understand and apply treatment based on a defined sequence of tasks to shape eating and tested cognitive and behavioral modification protocols: relaxation, self-awareness, desensitization, paradox, and self-acceptance training.
• Address eating for emotional reasons.

Will you benefit from attending?

• Are you an experienced professional who works with people who have established and entrenched distortions in eating attitudes and behaviors?
• Do you work in health or mental health?
• Are you looking for training in behavioral intervention that doesn’t require your going back to graduate school?
• Are you very familiar with the Satter Eating Competence Model and the Satter Feeding Dynamics Model?
• Are you willing and able to do reading and self-study to prepare for this workshop:
  • Read Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, Parts 1 and 2 and Chapter 10, plus appendixes.
  • Review the Eating Competence category on Resources and links for professionals.

Logistics

• Dates:  Virtually starting February, 2025
• Learning modes: Lecture, case study, video, problem-solving, role-playing, discussion.
• Weekly live Q&A/discussion:  Every Thursday for 8 weeks starting February 6, 2025 at 5:00 pm CT
• Contact hours: 38.75 hours of continuing education. Certificates of completion awarded.
• Fee for workshop includes downloadable manual valued at $289, handouts.
  • Registration:  $1,175 for individual; $1,075 for 2 or more participants; $975 for 4 + participants from same agency.
  • 20% discount on ESI materials purchased during workshop.
  • Workshop Cancellation:  ESI reserves the right to cancel the workshop up to 2 weeks prior to the event.  Full registration will be refunded by same method of payment.
• For more information, contact [email protected]

About VISION workshops

ESI VISION Workshops offer intensive, in-depth training for professionals in assessing and treating established feeding and eating problems. The training emphasizes understanding and applying the Satter Eating Competence Model and the Satter Feeding Dynamics Model. Evidence-based and extensively tested clinically, these workshops offer practical, powerful, and compassionate solutions for complex eating and feeding problems.