Did you eat a few too many cookies or sufganiyots over the holidays?
New Year’s Resolutions
If you are like most people, you gained a few pounds. So, right before 2017 rolls in, you’re dreading the New Year’s resolutions you’ll have to make.
A study in the journal Obesity can give you some direction in how to go about this process. In the study, people who were overweight with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes participated in a year-long randomized control trial. Carried out at 16 different research centers around the country, the study compared standard care and Weight Watchers. For those who do not know, standard care for poorly controlled diabetes and obesity is a meeting with a diabetes nutritionist and then follow-up informational materials. The Weight Watchers program included meetings with others in the community, online tools which are usual for Weight Watchers. However, this intervention also included phone and email communication with a certified diabetes educator.
The study finding revealed that the Weight Watchers program participants’ weight loss and control of their diabetes (measured by achieving HbA1c of less than 7.0%) was significantly different from the standard of care. They lost weight and controlled their diabetes better than the standard care. <caveat: Funding from Weight Watchers International “Neither WWI as the sponsor nor WWI authors played any role in the collection, management, analysis, or interpretation of the data.”>
Support makes a difference.
Some might wonder why we need to keep proving that support helps people over the course of life’s difficulties. Yet the “bootstrap” mentality is pervasive. What are bootstraps? They are your shoe or boot laces. In this imagined scenario, a person is supposed to do the impossible and lift themselves off the ground by yanking on their shoe laces. Or, metaphorically, the person gets out of difficult situations on their own.
In an interview aired on WBAI radio in September, Frieda Outlaw, PhD, RN, Expert Program Consultant at the American Nurses Association, described an intervention she started for women who weighed over 300 pounds. Struck by their young age (averaging 34 years old), she wanted to reach out to them with support and especially information before they developed chronic conditions.
However, after getting to know the group, she found that these women had knowledge about nutrition. In fact, they wanted to do something different; to eat differently and exercise. But they lived in a very poor community. They didn’t have a safe place to exercise. Most strikingly, “They didn’t have access to home refrigerators and they didn’t have access to grocery stores. So they had to get what was available and eat what was not perishable….So they had a choice…between donuts, bagels and things like that that they could keep in their apartments for a long time.” [emphasis added]
Ms. Outlaw had to change her intervention. Instead of addressing individuals and their lack of knowledge as the reason for behaviors, she looked at the environment which pushed those behaviors. It took time but working together, change happened.
Community, support and teamwork are critical components to change. Focusing only on the individual is counter-productive.
So, if you need to lose extra pounds, lose them with other people. Success is far more likely for you and your friends together, than for you individually. And you’ll have more fun!
