Understanding Your Eating

Professor Julia Buckroyd

Julia developed this Programme to help people whose overeating felt compulsive and addictive. She has been interested in why we eat what we eat for a long time now. Many years ago she was a newly trained counsellor working in a dance school with students. So many of them had problems with food and everything that goes with it – weight, shape and size – that she felt really motivated to understand why many of us seem unable to eat the way we know we should. She moved on to develop the UYE Programme at the University of Hertfordshire with an active programme of research investigating the usefulness of the programme to participants. Feedback was extremely positive with this quote from a client. “It was such a relief to know that I was not just greedy or weak-willed but I was trying to help myself.”

This research demonstrated that very many of us are soothing ourselves with food on a daily basis. Our culture provides us with more food than we know what to do with and we have found out how to use it to comfort ourselves. Unfortunately, that ‘comfort’ turns out not to be so comforting after all, if we use it too much. We can put on too much weight, with all the problems that creates, both physical and in terms of self-esteem. Our head can be full of ‘food noise’ which torments and distracts us from daily life. We need to put food into its (important) but ordinary place.

The Understanding Your Eating Programme aims to help you think about how you use food, so that you can be better placed to choose whether you want to continue doing it that way. You will learn to have much better ways of managing your feelings and will be less tempted to use food to comfort yourself. You will become more confident, with better self-esteem and a better body image. You will find that food becomes much less of an anxiety and no longer dominates your thinking. Doing this course has the potential to change your life.

The Licensed Practitioners

All of the Licensed Practitioners are qualified and experienced counsellors or health care professionals specialising in this field, who have been trained by Professor Julia Buckroyd, to run the Understanding Your Eating Programme. They have special interest and experience in working with people with disordered eating.
They all work within the ethical guidelines set out by their respective professional associations.
Find a Licensed Practitioner >