Nutritional Counseling Based on Self-compassion vs. Diet Approach on Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating

Overview

Current evidence has shown that the accepted standard of beauty, where women must be skinny, has increased body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. In order to deal with body dissatisfaction, the practice of restrictive diets - called the diet approach - becomes very often, although it can reinforce disordered eating and has questionable effects on body dissatisfaction. Self-compassion is an approach that proposes a kind and gentle look at body image issues and eating problems, which can be an alternative tool to deal with them. So, this study aims to compare a nutritional approach based on self-compassion techniques x a diet approach on dissatisfaction with body image, food restriction, and disordered eating in women who feel dissatisfied with their bodies.

A randomized clinical trial will be conducted with adult women randomly allocated into two groups - self-compassion (n=38) or diet approach (n=38) - that will follow over eight weeks. Each group will have weekly meetings of 1 hour, working on different subjects related to self-compassion or dietary choices each week, according to each group. The study outcomes are body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and self-compassion levels, measured through validated questionnaires. Data will be analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Science for Windows software, and differences between the two groups will be evaluated by the Student's T-test or the Mann-Whitney U test, according to sample distribution. The Chi-square test will analyze the associations between the type of approach and all measured outcomes. Significant differences will be considered when the P value \<0.05. As a result, the investigators expect that self-compassion will improve body dissatisfaction and attenuate disordered eating more than the diet approach.