IMPACT OF EATING BEHAVIOR NORMALIZATION AND WEIGHT CORRECTION PROGRAM ON SELF-IMAGE OF OVERWEIGHT WOMEN

In the 21st century, obesity has become a social problem in many countries, including Ukraine, where over 32% of the population are overweight people. Overweight is associated with an increase of the risk and frequency of many diseases and a significant deterioration of the individual's quality of life. Today, the researchers (both theorists and practitioners) emphasize in their works that the disorders of eating behavior are to a large extent the result of disturb-ance of the body image, and that is why both psychocorrection and psychotherapy of the body image and self-image are necessary for a complex correction of these disorders. The purpose of the research is to study the effect of the eat-ing behavior normalization and weight correction program on the self-image of overweight women. For the psychologi-cal diagnostics of the features of the self- image, the following methods were applied: 1) Self-Attitude Test by V. V. Stolin, 2) The Color-A-Person Body Dissatisfaction Test: of V.G. Sakharova, 3) Body Self-Perception Inventory by V. Shebanova. Diagnostics after the implementation of the program has proved its effectiveness, namely: a) a sig-nificant improvement of general self-esteem (p≤0.01), increase of self-esteem (p≤0.05), self-acceptance (p≤0.01), self-interest (p≤0.05), improvement of self-understanding (p≤0.01); b) all women showed increased satisfaction with their bodies and their certain parts (p≤0.01); c) despite the objective weight loss, the women continued feeling discomfort about their appearance in some situations. Thus, normalization of eating behavior and weight correction by deliberate making efforts greatly improves the perception of body and general self-attitude of overweight women.