Clinicians and clients love Craving Change!
“A focus on self-awareness and cognitive behavioural strategies is essential for successful, long term behaviour change. Cannon and Shah have brilliantly translated theory into simple, ready-to-use tools that will help your clients change life-long eating habits.”
Arya M. Sharma, MD, FRCPC
Past Chair in Obesity Research and Management, University of Alberta
“Changing lifelong eating patterns can be challenging! Cannon and Shah translate psycho-educational strategies into practical exercises you can use to help your clients understand the complexities of food cravings and get the ‘power’ back in their willpower.”
Charlotte Jones, PhD, MD – Endocrinologist
“A valuable resource for clinicians working in a neglected area. Craving Change® is attractively laid out, coherently presented, and evidence-based. It should be a welcome addition to a great many health care agencies and services.”
Randy Paterson, PhD, RPsych – Author / Director, Changeways Clinic
“This ideal skill mix of dietitian and psychologist provides simple, yet powerful concepts that assist in building clients’ eating self-efficacy.”
Kerry Wakefield, Bariatric Clinical Practice Consultant – Central Adelaide Local Health Network, Australia
“It was really neat to see the ‘lightbulb’ moment when my client recognized that his all-or-nothing thinking was holding him back from positive change. He kept saying, “This makes so much sense!” He had never made the connection between his thought patterns and his eating, and he shared that this was one of his biggest takeaways. I particularly love the program’s Change Buffet strategies, as they are so adaptive and work well in my individual sessions with clients!”
Britney Lentz, Registered Dietitian and Nutrition Counsellor – Health Stand Nutrition
“We include a Craving Change session as part of our virtual cardiac rehab program. Ranging from 40 to 89 years old, some of the patients have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Their goals may include improving their nutrition and diet choices, being more mindful during eating and improving their relationship with food. During my 1:1 follow-up sessions with the patients, they report that they are more mindful and that they have a lot of ‘heart hunger’. They have discovered ways to ‘put their craving on hold’ or distract themselves with other ways to nurture themselves.”
Alia El Kubbe, RD – St. Joseph’s Health Centre, London, Ontario
“I read over the ‘Rehearsing your Lines’ facilitation tips before every Craving Change class I deliver. Though I often hear clients say things like, “This is just common sense” during the classes, I always see improvement in people’s day-to-day food and self-care choices through their participation in the workshop series. Some of the RDs in our organization have used your children’s book with families and have found it extremely helpful. I love how you’re continuing to grow and strengthen, adjusting content as needed to emerging evidence. I appreciate the work you do – Thank you!”
Veronica Cail, RD – Prairie Mountain Health Region, Manitoba
“As a social worker, I often use the cognitive-behavioural approach to understanding why we do some of the self-destructive things we do, to set aside self-judgment, and explore unhelpful thoughts in order to improve emotions and change self-sabotaging behaviours. I find the Craving Change program comprehensive and well organized. The handouts make facilitation more productive, and I appreciate that we can adjust the information according to the ‘micro-culture’ of the group.”
Denise McClure, SW – Horizon Health, New Brunswick
“I recently went to your website for some inspiration for my practice and was delighted with the free tool that I received when I signed up for your newsletters. I did the “Why we eat” discussion in my new group program last week over Zoom and it was a blast!! Once my clients got going in the Chat with the “Why we eat” ideas, I couldn’t keep up. This works so well!”
Cheryl Strachan, RD – Sweet Spot Nutrition
“It brings value to our clinic to be able to offer this class to patients. Specifically, we offer a 12-week Healthy Lifestyle program and Craving Change is the perfect supplemental class for patients to take after this class…. they then have the healthy lifestyle knowledge… but then Craving Change allows them to assess their environment/behaviours and support them in making healthy changes.”
Ali Myers, RD – Lumino Health
“Participants in our study seem to like the ‘types of hunger’ idea and immediately understand the different definitions and integrate the idea into their awareness of their appetite.”
Michelle Jospe, PhD Candidate – University of Otago, New Zealand
“After reviewing the three CBT circles with the program’s driving example, I encourage the group to share personal examples that we work through together using the same CBT discussion. If we change the thought, how would it change the emotion, and how would it change the behavior? Or, if we change the behaviour, how would it change the thought (i.e. a successful behaviour will create a positive emotion and motivating thoughts). My clients love the non-judgmental approach and feel released from many of their negative thoughts about eating. They often have “aha” moments and appear much more relaxed at the end of class than at the beginning, as if a weight has been lifted from their shoulders. They adjust their thinking, for example their “I feel bad that I ate that donut” thought can change to, ” I experienced some mouth hunger today and I enjoyed eating a donut hole and, because of my 80/20 mindset, I know that I can have a donut hole, eat well the rest of the time and not feel bad about it.”
Rachel McBryan, RD – Wise Eats
“Congratulations on the growth of Craving Change! I haven’t come across a course like it yet. My employer is interested in my use of Craving Change® for our client groups.”
Christine McIntosh, Dietitian
Cairns and Hinterland Mental Health Service, Queensland Health
“I really liked the simplicity of this approach to snacking. First, I encouraged my client to be more aware of her usual food intake using the three types of hunger tool. My client was amazed at how often she was snacking for a reason other than ‘stomach hunger’. She identified some habitual snacking based on where she was and the time of day, plus a lot of boredom snacking.
The next step was to choose a cognitive behavioral strategy to address this. She chose to have a list of distractions to choose from that would fulfill her emotional need. Just having this awareness and plan gave her a sense of control over her emotional eating.
Rather than just saying “drink water and ignore it” which rarely works, the Craving Change CBT strategies go to the core of what emotion is driving the craving. It is empowering to have options that are personalized to the individual since they know what will fulfill that emotion more than anyone else. I will return to this CBT approach regularly!”
Jennifer Lyons, RDN, CDCES – Jenn Lyons Nutrition, LLC, Virginia USA
