Behaviour Change conference: connections, food for thought, and insights

Last week I was at the Behaviour Change conference in Lisbon - was an amazing couple of days (despite the persistent rain!), connecting with brilliant people, catching up with people I rarely see, and consuming lots of amazing presentations. 

Connections - the start of something exciting?

The first day I arrived I met Olivia Palmer, who is a Health Psychologist and Nutritionist who is also super interested in weight neutral and intuitive approaches to health. We were both really excited to discover that we were so aligned in our passion for this space, and talked for ages sharing thoughts and ideas!

I also got the chance to catch up with Katy Irving, who is a brilliant behavioural scientist whom I already knew - I recently learned that she is also super interested in these weight neutral approaches from our chatter on LinkedIn, so it was great to meet up and talk about it in person.

It was amazing to spend time with people who care about this as much as I do. We’re now plotting a virtual get-together to chat further - and to maybe collaborate somehow! I feel really energised by this: cementing these connections is probably the most valuable thing I’m taking away from this conference. 

Musings on weight-neutral approaches

The conference was also a great opportunity to chat with others in the health space about what I’m currently working on. It led to some really interesting and inspiring conversations. Here are some general musings, from my conversations with Olivia and Katy, and other behavioural scientists at the conference:

Diabetes seems like a great starting point for weight-inclusive interventions - despite it being potentially challenging for intuitive eating, due to its many “shoulds” - because:

1. We know that stigma and shame is a real issue in diabetes (something we also heard about in some of the conference talks) - people often feel like they’ve brought it on themselves, and that others will judge them for it. In spite of this, weight is often the first thing that’s measured and addressed by healthcare professionals - even though this probably won’t help with this stigma and shame. Intuitive approaches may have the potential to be less judgemental. 
2. There’s already a system in place for measuring health markers other than weight and BMI - we can objectively measure people’s health and whether they’re improving, by looking at measures like their HbA1c. 

GLP-1s might feel like “yet another phase of diet culture” (to me, at least), but they could potentially tell us interesting things about our eating behaviour and how bodies respond to urges. Given they suppress your appetite, it’d be interesting to see how people behave around food in the absence of such strong urges to eat. I don’t personally want to work in this space (and we should be much more careful about how we use and talk about them), but we discussed how health psychology could be missing a trick by not exploring this.

Could intuitive eating interventions worsen health inequalities? I was (rightly) challenged on this by someone who pointed out that giving your body what it wants and needs might be easier for middle class people living in environments of abundance, but very difficult for people whose diet is restricted by the amount of money they have, or the environment they live in (e.g. food deserts). I suspect that this is very likely true - however, I would argue that this is true of many traditional weight loss interventions, too. I don’t think intuitive eating interventions claim to solve major systemic issues like food poverty - but it is really important that work is done to address these, too. Essentially, intuitive eating might help some of us, but it’s not enough to solve the world’s health problems.

Learning highlights

Lastly I wanted to share some highlights from a couple of the presentations that I saw during the conference - this might be more for the fellow behavioural science geeks among you!

Firstly was a talk from Emma Solomon-Moore from the University of Bath, who did some great research into weight stigma in women (of all sizes) aged 18-35. She found that weight stigma is internalised by women of all sizes, but is especially pertinent for those of us in bigger bodies, and that striving for the “right” weight and shape is exhausting. 

A quote which I found unsurprising but nonetheless heartbreaking was that “Women make themselves literally and metaphorically smaller to avoid stigma”.

In more promising news, many of the women in her study also talked about reframing of health, away from weight and appearance - I think this is a shift we’ve seen in the last few years, and I really hope we can continue this (although recent trends suggest we could be moving back in the opposite direction). She also found that as the women got older, they were less troubled by this weight stigma - I love the thought of brilliant middle-aged women finally breaking free of the shackles of body expectations! 

I also really enjoyed a talk by Viktoria Egele on the most effective strategies or enhancing self-efficacy (which is the belief in yourself to succeed) in physical activity. She found that the most promising strategies for this are:

• Mastery experience - so the more you do a thing successfully, the greater your belief that you can do it again
• Verbal self-persuasion - using “self-talk” to tell yourself that you can do it
• Positive affective states - when we feel things like joy, enthusiasm, and pride, our self-efficacy is likely to be higher

So maybe take the time to reflect on how you feel about exercise - do you ever doubt your ability to go for that run, play a new sport, or do that dance class? Maybe spend a bit of time telling yourself that you CAN do it, and see how it feels (or maybe, just do something that makes you feel really good first, then try!)

Continuing conversations

I’ve adored geeking out amongst like-minded people this week, and it’s reminded me to lift my head up from my desk sometimes to make sure I’m having conversations, not just reading. With that in mind, if you’d like to chat about all things weight-neutral diet and exercise, let me know - it doesn’t matter whether you’re a fellow behavioural scientist, a provider interested in improving their work, or an individual struggling with change in your own life!