Telephone counseling may keep the pounds off
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Counseling delivered over the phone may help people who’ve successfully lost weight to keep those pounds off for the long haul, a study published Monday suggests.
Researchers found that of more than 200 obese women who completed a weight-loss program, those who continued to receive counseling — either in person or by phone — were more successful at keeping the weight off for another year than women who only received newsletters with diet tips.
Telephone counseling appeared just as effective as face-to-face sessions.
The findings suggest that such remote counseling could offer a convenient, relatively cheap way to aid successful weight loss — particularly for people living in rural areas with limited healthcare services, the researchers report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
All of the women in the study lived in rural counties in Florida. Travel expenses meant that while in-person counseling was helpful, it was also more costly, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Michael G. Perri of the University of Florida, Gainesville.
“Telephone counseling,” they write, “constitutes an effective and cost-efficient option for long-term weight management.”
The study included 234 obese women who went through a 6-month weight-loss program that included small-group sessions on how to eat healthy and start a home-based exercise routine.
In the end, the women lost an average of 22 pounds.
They were then randomly assigned to one of three groups: one that continued to receive face-to-face counseling every other week for the next year; one that received the same counseling, but over the phone; and a “control” group that received newsletters with general weight-loss advice.
Women in the two counseling groups talked with counselors about any problems they were having maintaining their healthy new lifestyle and got advice on how to get past those hurdles.
After 1 year, Perri’s team found, women in both counseling groups had regained only about 2 pounds, on average — versus an average of 8 pounds in the control group.
The extended counseling seemed to work, at least in part, by helping the women keep tabs on their food intake. Women in these groups were more likely to follow the programs’ advice to keep records of what they ate each day, and the number of daily records a woman kept was directly related to her long-term weight loss success.
Those findings, Perri and his colleagues note, “highlight the critical role that vigilant monitoring of food intake may play in the maintenance of lost weight.”
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, November 24, 2008.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Related Posts:
LONDON (Reuters) - Phone and email counseling help people improve their diet and lose weight, according to a Dutch study published on Friday that points to a potentially simple but effective tool in the fight against obesity. The study of 1,400 Dutch overweight workers suggests this kind of lifestyle advice is especially good for people unwilling
Full Post: Weight loss a phone call away, study finds
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Obese people who have lost substantial amounts of weight without surgery can do just as well at maintaining the healthier weight as their peers who lost weight via gastric surgery. That’s the finding of the first study to compare the two strategies. However, people who go the non-surgical route may have
Full Post: Weight can be kept off no matter how it’s lost
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Losing weight is easier when there is money on the line, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. They said weight-loss programs that reward people with money — and remind them of the cash they stand to lose if they fail — provided a powerful incentive to lose weight compared with more conventional
Full Post: Weight loss easier when you get paid for it
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Losing weight is always hard and you want to do it as fast as possible, but how fast can it really be? For instance, is it possible to lose 10 pounds in a day? The answer to that question is a resounding no. Losing 10 lbs in 1 day is impossible and if you stumble upon
Full Post: How to Lose 10 Pounds in a Day
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the best ways to stimulate your weight loss and increase your overall success losing weight is to consider trying a detoxifying diet that will help you lose up to 10 pounds in one week healthily. Once you detox your body, you will automatically have more energy and thereby you will increase your ability
Full Post: One of the Most Effective Ways to Stimulate Weight Loss is To Do a Detox Body Cleanse Diet