How the church can help with emotional eating

Dr Deborah Lycett gives an update on the Taste & See programme

At the start of the year I wrote about Taste & See, a church-based programme to help individuals develop a healthy relationship with food. In particular it is designed to reduce emotional eating, and address the guilt and shame that surrounds weight concerns. Many people struggle with being overweight physically, emotionally and spiritually, and the church can offer real hope through this programme.

However for the churches’ role in such programmes to be taken seriously by society we need to prove these programmes work, and so up until now Taste & See has been running only as part of a research trial.

So far around 130 people in 14 different churches, around the country, have taken part in the free research trial programme and more are in the pipeline. We were in receipt of a small amount of research funding that enabled us to offer this programme for free in this way. However, for some churches the random allocation to one of two preferred dates has been difficult, and at the request of churches to be more flexible with dates we have now made the programme available to purchase.

If you would like to buy this programme you may now do so and details are available here: http://tastes.coventry.ac.uk/how-much-does-it-cost/.

However, please bear in mind that this programme is in its infancy and is not yet a highly polished product. We will use any surplus funds from selling the programme to develop it further and so we are keen to find out how those who take part in a bought programme get on too.

We do, however, still have a few free packs, for churches who would like to take part in the research trial. To find out what this involves and how to get one of these please see: http://tastes.coventry.ac.uk/how-to-run-taste-see/

Dr Deborah Lycett RD PhD deborah.lycett@coventry.ac.uk
Reader (Associate Professor) in Nutrition, Dietetics and Spiritual Health, Coventry University
Member of St Peter’s Baptist Church, Worcester

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