Developing a Supportive-Offline Therapy Focused on Acceptance and Commitment and Its Effect on Self-Efficacy in Weight Management in Overweight or Obese Individuals

Although research findings show that online psychological interventions can be a good alternative to face-to-face interventions, some people still have time constraints on joining a social support group, even online. Therefore, this study was initially conducted with the aim of developing a supportive-offline therapy focused on acceptance and commitment and then examined its effect on self-efficacy in weight management in overweight or obese people. The development of supportive-offline therapy focused on acceptance and commitment was as follows: In the offline intervention section, instructional videos and some worksheets for 7 sessions were created based on the principles and exercises of acceptance and commitment and were provided once a weekly basis. The duration of each video was about 30 minutes. In the supportive part of this therapy, weekly telephone follow-ups were done with the subjects, during which the progress of the subjects was examined and their possible questions were answered. The method of this research was semi-experimental pretest-posttest with a control group. The statistical population of the study was all volunteers who were invited to this study during the calls for 27 people. 20 people among the mentioned community who met the inclusion criteria entered the study. Volunteers answered the Clark et al.’s (1991) self-efficacy in weight management questionnaire before and after the interventions. The results showed that supportive-offline therapy focused on acceptance and commitment increases the self-efficacy in weight management and all its sub-comparisons (p <0.05). From these findings, it was concluded that supportive-offline interventions can be an effective alternative to some face-to-face or online psychological interventions, especially during the corona pandemic.