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Is
There A Way To Help Keep Off Lost Weight? In the United States and many other countries, obesity is definitely a major problem because it represents an expanding public health threat. When people become overweight or obese, they are prone to develop heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), Type-2 diabetes, certain types of cancer and many other medical disorders. A recent study in May 2009 even suggested obesity may put people who are infected with H1N1 at risk of having a severe case that might end up with death. As such, most doctors will advise their obese patients to lose weight. Though many people can lose weight, they often do not have the stamina to keep the weight off. Instead, they regain all the weight and frequently more. Health experts do have good information on how to help people lose weight in a healthy way but they are usually lack of effective means to assist people maintain that weight loss. Last year (2008), a study conducted in United States had found that people who had lost weight were more likely to keep it off if they chatted regularly with a counselor rather than periodically visiting a website that provides advice or getting no regular continuing assistance. Despite the benefit was not huge, the little extra weight which they kept off compared to others in the study could give them significant health advantages. This was revealed by researchers from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina in the study that they claimed to be the largest and longest assessment of weight-loss maintenance strategies. The findings were published on March 11, 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association
The study involved 1,032 overweight or obese middle-aged people at 4 sites across the United States who had lost an average of 8.5 kg during a 6-month weight loss program. These participants were randomly assigned to one of the 3 groups and then followed for 2 and a half more years. Participants in the first group had monthly personal talks on diet and physical activity with trained weight-loss counselors usually by telephone, but they had hour-long face-to-face meetings with counselors every 4 months. People in the second group were asked to visit an interactive website with information and tools for tracking weight, keeping food diaries and monitoring exercise levels. For the third group, people were largely on their own. Most of the participants had regained some weight at the end of the study. However, the group having personal contact with counselors regularly regained the least amount of weight, an average of 4 kg. The group who used the website regained 5.2 kg, while people who were on their own regained 5.5 kg. Website used in the study had been made to be as interactive and responsive as possible, yet the results suggested that an actual human being can be more responsive and interactive than it could. There are 30 percent of people in the United States are obese and another 30 percent (roughly) are overweight. Such a large scale will surely make personal weight-loss maintenance counseling extremely difficult. It is merely impossible to find enough dietitians in the world to deal with this on a personal one-to-one basis. Perhaps, researchers might need to find out other more efficient and effective ways to help combat the obesity epidemic.
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