Emotion focused therapy and dietary counseling for obese patients with binge eating disorder: a propensity score-adjusted study

From a clinical point of view, our results, along with literature data, show that EFT, a psychotherapy focused on the cognitive and interpersonal experiential perspectives of emotions associated with DC, produces promising results on binge eating remission, weight loss, binge eating behavior and health-related quality of life in treatment-seeking BED patients with obesity. The data also suggest that the combination of EFT and DC might be a promising strategy to produce both an improvement of the eating disorder psychopathology and a healthy amount of weight loss. The main limitations of the study include the short-term follow-up, the different rates of dropout between groups and the nonrandom assignment to groups. Matching by propensity, the advantages and limits of which have been discussed elsewhere, may only partly overcome the allocation bias. Our data may be considered the basis for future confirmatory studies with long-term follow-up and a randomized controlled design