This paper is a literature review of current work on the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques to treat obesity and attendant psychopathologies. It discusses two articles by G. Terence Wilson and one by Jacqueline Carter. Although Wilson’s work is methodologically sound, his focus is not primarily on obesity, but on the whole spectrum of eating disorders, mainly in the context of one-on-one therapy or analysis. Carter, by contrast, confines her research to the treatment of obesity while attempting to integrate “outside-the-lab” methods and self-help measures that, while they produce “noisier” data, may prove more useful to patients than further confirmation that cognitive-behavioral therapies work in the treatment of eating disorders that have not passed a certain level of severity.
