Counseling and Psychological Services

WesGUIDE

 

Our Mission

WesGUIDE is a student-run group affiliated with Wesleyan’s Counseling and Psychological Services. We run a peer-guided self-help program for students who struggle with binge eating.

What is “binge eating”?

Binge eating involves the consumption of excessively large amounts of food with a feeling of loss of control. Binge eating is not uncommon among both male and female college students.

Not everyone who binges feels that it is a problem. However, for many students, binge eating has negative repercussions, such as low mood, distress, excessive weight gain, and lost time. Frequent binge eating can detrimentally affect students’ psychological health, physical health, relationships, and school performance.

Our Program

To help students rebuild a healthy relationship with food, our program has two core components:

1)    An intervention book. We utilize Christopher Fairburn’s cognitive-behavioral based self-help book, Overcoming Binge Eating (1995, 2013). This intervention is very highly regarded, and much empirical evidence demonstrates that it works.

2)    Peer coaching sessions. Each student is paired with a Peer Coach who provides support and assists with problem solving. Peer Coaches are Wesleyan undergraduates who have been carefully trained as part of WesGUIDE.

The program usually lasts eight weeks, though it can be tailored to fit each student’s needs. Each week the student meets with his or her coach for a half hour session, reads the next step in the program, and works to regularize and regain control over his or her eating. In total, the time commitment is about 2 or 3 hours per week.

All sessions are one-on-one, free-of-cost and completely confidential.

Getting Started

If you are interested in participating in the program, please take our quick (less than five minutes), anonymous, and confidential screening survey.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at wesguide@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you soon!

Peer Coach Training

If you are interested in training this semester to become a Peer Coach next fall, please email us at wesguide@gmail.com.