Abstract:

Problem:
There are two effective ways to help people with obesity: to prevent the cause of obese or to relieve the negative effects of it. The medical help is mostly oriented onto second way. But if we prefer to prevent behavior, which is contrary to norms of healthy lifestyle, the most effective way is to develop and realize special training programs for those, who are under the strong impact not only of advertising of different soft drinks and unhealthy kinds of food, but job related factors.
Those programs should be based on both as explicit attitudes as implicit ones. That is why the implicit attitudes of eating behavior should be studied and described carefully. We would like to pay our attention to the task of development training Program “Save your healthy weight” for 25 - 30 y. o. post-graduate students of Business Schools.

The idea:
We worked out our Program “Save your healthy weight”, taking into account our clinical experience, previous research (Martemyanova, 2011), and practical importance of obesity problem for office workers. To enhance the personal meaning of scientific evidence, we made decision to “translate” it onto professional language which is friendly to participants of our Program.

Practical implication:
Program “Save your healthy weight” consists of three parts.
First one is devoted to explicit signals which are triggers to start to eat. That triggers are taking place at business lunch with partners, or presentation, or different kinds of small parties to celebrate successful deals. Trainer explains, how to overtake emerging explicit obstacles to control own eating behavior at the same situations and how to choose and realize different effective strategies for dealing with food.

Second part of Program is devoted to implicit signals which are triggers to start to eat. That triggers are taking place at stress situation, in depression, or under strong press conditions. The person faces with not any direct impact of invitation to eat, but his implicit attitudes to stress situation. Trainer explains, how identify those signals, what does implicit attitude mean, if it is possible to manage implicit attitudes or not.

Third part of program is devoted to different strategies for dealing with food and thus managing own eating behavior. Trainer explains how to work out effective strategy. To explain it, trainer applies analytical technics borrowed from business course Strategy Management, such as PEST-analysis and SWOT-analysis. Thus, well known to students SWOT-analysis may be successfully use to analyze as personal characteristics (person’s Strengths and Weakness) as group of environmental factors (Opportunities and Treatments for effective eating behavior). And after that, all 4 types of strategies are compared and discussed. Use the Theory of forces, by K.Lewin, to describe the picture, where ‘Forces of support VS Forces of resistance to healthy behavior’ presented, should be not only interesting, but also persuasively.

The main advantage of proposed Program is that, on the one hand, it based at strong theoretical background, and on the other hand, it explains main points by professional language well acquainted to participants.

Keywords:

Explicit and implicit attitudes to eating behavior, to avoid obesity.