PhD grad working to shift the thinking on women’s mental health and weight

Eva Pila with Professor Catherine Sabiston (photo by Arnold Lam)
10/11/2017

Postdoctoral research fellow Eva Pila wants to change the conversation about obesity and women’s mental and physical health. Pila celebrated the successful defense of her PhD at U of T’s November 8 fall convocation ceremony and she’s already making an impact, translating her knowledge into real world solutions.

Pila is two months into a post-doctoral collaborative project based out of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and Women’s College Hospital, where she is contributing to a program designed to support a group of 50 women struggling with their weight, while coping with a spectrum of mental health challenges.

Pila started to narrow her research focus during her years as a kinesiology undergrad when she discovered a passion for mental health and body image issues. She later connected with Professor Catherine Sabiston for her graduate work and her PhD dissertation, “Weighing in: Psychological Outcomes Associated with Weight Changes among Women Treated for Breast Cancer,” which explores how women with breast cancer cope with excess weight. Her study is the first of its kind to apply theories about self-compassion as an intervention in this population. “Obesity and breast cancer are closely associated,” she explains. “So women who are overweight or living with obesity are at higher risk of developing breast cancers and they are less responsive to their treatment and they tend to have worse survival overall.” Working with this vulnerable population increased Pila’s understanding of the potential power of self-compassion. “What I found was that these women were constantly being told by their health care team and families that they needed to manage their weight because their breast cancer treatment depends on it. And if they were unsuccessful at losing the weight, they ended up feeling horrible about themselves.”

Alternatively, through her research, she found that self-compassion-centred approaches appear to have a high potential to improve the psychological health and well-being of women across the weight spectrum, and throughout the cancer trajectory.  Exercising self-compassion means taking a more understanding approach with your own struggles, avoiding being self-critical and recognizing your own experiences as being part of a larger, shared human experience. This mindful approach also appears to help women get back on track faster after missteps in their weight management strategies.

Self-compassion in cancer patients may sound obvious, but in truth, for so many women struggling with their weight, guilt and self judgement after perceived failure tend to persist, no matter what the health diagnosis.

In her post-doctoral work, Pila is transferring these themes and this philosophy to women with mental health struggles. “As a society we are told you can manage your weight. One of the comments that was on my grant application was, ‘well, if we encourage these women to be compassionate about their weight, maybe they won't try as hard.” That’s exactly the paradigm Pila is working against to combat, this societal belief that there is a connection between being overweight and being a failure.  

For many mental health patients, these weight struggles are compounded by their unique medical needs and the complexity of their treatments. “The medications that are prescribed for these conditions are associated with a significant amount of weight gain. It’s a very difficult situation. I think that understanding this complexity makes you more compassionate. When you look at all of the other literature in weight management, we know that the way we've been doing things is not effective. So while using self-compassion with this subset of women is all very new, it seems extremely promising.”

Postdoctoral fellow Eva Pila is currently being supervised by Dr. Valerie Taylor. Her research project is being funded by a  grant from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.