Jillian's Wellness Team

Dr John La Puma

John La Puma, M.D., is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine and a professionally trained chef. He hosts a weekly segment on Lifetime Television’s Health Corner called "What’s Cooking With ChefMD?" and has written several books, including ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine. When he’s not lecturing or appearing on television, he can be found helping patients at his private practice in Santa Barbara, California.

Visit his Web site.

Weight Loss Maintenance on the Web

The new excellent weight loss study from Kaiser shows that people who lose 9# over 6 months can maintain almost half the loss over 3 years if they login, engage, and post their weight on their weight loss website.  

So, accountability is transferable, because 4 factors have been shown to be the key to weight loss maintenance: accountability, individualization of diet, adequate exercise (400+ minutes weekly) and consistent self-monitoring.

The National Weight Control Registry has over 40 research studies from the top investigators devoted to successful weight loss maintenance, and those 4 factors are it.

At the end of this internet study, 65 percent of the participants were still logging on to the website--an average of about once per week--which is way better adherence than most weight loss studies, and as good as my own medical weight loss practice.

Success to these researchers meant regaining just 56% of initial weight lost.  That's compared with regaining over 90% of initial weight lost in the other research groups.

Weight regain is not success for most dieters. Most define success as more than 10% of body weight loss, and are disappointed when it is not achieved and maintained. Understandable.

Because we should be able to do better for truly motivated people with a personal or medical reason to keep weight off once they have lost it.