Supervised Diet-Behavior Modification of Abnormal Eating Behavior

Lee, Hye Kyung; Lee, Young Ho

Abstract

Supervised diet indicates the therapist to make meal with patients for the modification of their abnormal eating behaviors. It's purpose is to help the patients to confront with fear of eating and to manage secondary symptoms due to refeeding. It also modifies cognition, emotion and behavior related to eating and foods. Through these procedures, a healthy meal habit would be established by patients. Therefore, supervised diet is not only for the supervision of eating but it includes various therapeutic factors such as therapeutic alliance, therapist's attitude, therapeutic environment and therapeutic schedule which includes the comprehensive assessment. Supervised diet has many difficulties in clinical application and it consumes so much energy of the therapist. However, it is an important therapy by itself and it plays a role of a bridge to other therapies such as CBT and psychotherapy. Despite the usefulness of this method, it is difficult to find a clinic which practice the supervised diet in Korea. The literatures that report the supervised diet is also scarce. Therefore, the authors reviewed literatures and introduced our supervised diet treatment experiences with eating disorder patients at the Eating Disorders/Obesity Clinic of Seoul Paik Hospital.