Understanding the behavioural psychology of self-esteem for Slimming World.
10th November 2023
Walnut Unlimited
Exploring how self-talk affects weight and body image.
Slimming World wanted to explore language and how it is used when we talk about ourselves, particularly the language surrounding body image and fitness. Walnut Unlimited worked with nutritional experts and behavioural psychologists from Slimming World to devise a study that measures how critical and negative language can damage our self-esteem.
Talking about our own self-esteem and feelings does not come easily to many people. Feelings of shame, embarrassment, envy or even self-loathing can make it difficult to honestly articulate. We used our most sensitive qualitative skills to develop a study to allow people the freedom to self-express as honestly as possible. An online bulletin board with plenty of projective techniques and gentle questioning enabled us to understand how negativity can turn into something more damaging when it comes to our self-esteem.
We also quantified some of our key theories from the qualitative stage to enable Slimming World to measure how big an impact language has on our feelings.
Slimming World released their report, MIND Your Language in January 2020, supported by us at Walnut Unlimited, behavioural psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos and Slimming World’s Head of Nutrition Dr Jacquie Lavin.
You can read the full report here: https://www.slimmingworld.co.uk/press/mind-your-language
Thank you to the team at Walnut Unlimited. You did a great job in such a short space of time. You handled our brief with great creativity, and I really appreciate the support you gave when coming to you with a million ways of cutting the data to help us tell the most compelling story. We have had an amazing response to the campaign, and in the week of the release we undertook 23 radio interviews about the research which reached 3.8 million listeners.
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