Family doctors are to be issued with new guidelines on how to help patients deal with being overweight and obese.
The guidelines will be contained in the report from the National Obesity Taskforce which is due to be launched by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern next week.
The report will make a host of recommendations aimed at tackling the obesity epidemic, which costs the State an estimated €370 million annually and is responsible for at least 2,000 premature deaths a year.
Among them will be a recommendation to double the hours devoted to physical education in primary schools, that the Department of Finance conduct research into the effects of fiscal policies on food consumption, and that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Department of Health enter talks immediately with the private sector with a view to taking action on the marketing and advertising of products that contribute to weight gain.
Dr Ethel Quayle, a psychology lecturer at University College Cork, warned GPs not to condemn overweight patients who fail to lose weight as unmotivated individuals who are ignoring an obvious threat to their health and lives. She was addressing GPs attending a weekend meeting in Dublin to discuss the taskforce report. She said a culture of failed diets had left many with a psychological condition termed "learned helplessness".
Rather than being unmotivated or irresponsible, these failed dieters genuinely doubted that reducing their intake of fatty foods and increasing exercise would spell success by lowering weight.
"There has been a tendency to assume that when there is poor engagement in the treatment offered, or poor response, that it is because the patient is unmotivated," Dr Quayle explained.
"But recent findings suggest that the failure results from a decrease in the patient's belief that they can control their weight to a worthwhile extent. Convinced of the hopelessness of the situation, they return to the eating and exercise patterns that first contributed to their weight problem."
Cork GP Dr John O'Riordan, a member of the obesity taskforce that organised the meeting, agreed patients can become despondent when battling to control their weight.
He said overweight patients could only operate on blind faith for so long and when changes in weight failed to materialise, they assumed that dieting and exercise didn't work.
"The initially small and slow reduction in weight seems disproportionate to the effort being invested in weight control and so patients abandon the strategy," he said.
"Where a patient is not able to achieve weight loss within three months, we can add medication to their diet and an exercise regime to help shed the initial kilos and show that results are possible through healthy living," Dr O'Riordan added.