Can Body Group Therapy after Bariatric Surgery be Effective to Avoid Weight Regain? A Clinical Experience

Every group is formed by a therapist leader and 15 participants. The overt task of the group is to achieve weight maintenance. The group foundation is based on the communication about feelings and physical perception coping with the peculiar nutritional program after surgery.

This work in progress reconstructs or substitutes a reliable relation model in the area of the affective bond and determines a real enhancement of subjects’ coping capacity strengthening their own self-esteem. These two components enable the group members to elaborate the negative body image and invest in the new slim body image as an agent of change.

The therapist pushes participants to describe the new eating behavior and the sensation of satiety supported by the effective increase of satiety feeling induced by surgery that allows a new regulation of primary need hunger-satiety. In post-operation period, patients need to follow a liquid, semi-liquid, semi-solid and solid diet, conditioned by the surgical reduction of the gastric pouch. This experience brings to memory the event of weaning and allows the therapist to help group members to go again through the weaning experience of childhood: surgical patient-child is fed by the sufficient holding therapist- mother.

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