My doctor, my weight and cool stuff from Sweden

As noted in my last post, I was a crazy traveling person last week, including a day spent in Stockholm, Sweden at the International Congress on Obesity (ICO).  It was a big day for Weight Watchers for reasons that I will get to in a little bit.

Before, I talk about Sweden, I wanted to share my own personal experience with my doctor as it relates to my weight.  The year was 1998, and I was getting my first physical in many years.  At the time of said physical, I weighed about 40 pounds more than I do now, and I had both high cholesterol (the bad kind) and high blood pressure.  It was in that visit that my doctor told me that it was time to lose weight and get my lifestyle together, or I would be looking at a lifetime of medication.  Suffice to say, it was an alarming conversation for me and was a clear wake-up call.  I have to say that if there was one single event that pushed me to get my physical life together, it was this conversation with my doctor.

If there was one issue with that conversation with my doctor, it was simply that I did not know what to do next.  She gave me a target number of calories to consume each day, and sent me on my way.  To be clear, my doctor is pretty amazing, and I trust her implicitly.  She is an incredibly committed physician, and I don't blame her for not giving me more specific advice.  The reality of her world does not easily afford the opportunity to provide nutrition counseling for her myriad of patients.  Further, it's not obvious that this kind of weekly counseling would be the best use of her (or her nurse's) time.  What she did provide was a much needed push.  What she also provided was a reason for me to come back with better numbers:  my next physical.  In other words, my doctor played a critical role in my weight loss process in creating a sense or urgency and a sense of accountability to lose the weight.

The "doing" part of losing weight did not happen until I joined Weight Watchers as employee and member.  The week-in and week-out of participating in the program, keeping track of my points, attending my meetings and measuring my progress (or not) on the scale was what generated the actual results.  This is the Weight Watchers zone of excellence, and it delivered for me big time.

For me, the combination of my doctor and Weight Watchers is ultimately what made the difference.

So what does this have to do with Stockholm, Sweden?  For the past couple of years, a team of highly regarded academics in the UK, Germany and Australia have been working on a multi-country, large scale (n = 772) randomized clinical trial (RCT) efficacy study.  Here is how the study worked:

• Doctor sees patient who is overweight and talks to the patient about the importance of losing weight.
• Doctor randomly assigns patient either to 1) the "standard care" that ideally they would normally provide or 2) Weight Watchers.  In this case, "standard care" is defined by government public health guidelines that typically include having a nurse or nurse practitioner teach the patient how to follow a healthy diet and then have follow-up coaching visits.  Sadly, "standard care" does not always happen, often due to time pressures faced by over-burdened doctors' offices.  
• The study was done over a 12 month period

The results?  Those who were assigned to Weight Watchers lost twice as much weight as those assigned to standard care through the doctor's office.  Further, of the 56% of those completing the trial (a really good result, by the way) in the Weight Watchers arm, 60% lost 5% or 10% or more.  A 5% weight loss is the point where medical benefits begin to evidence themselves, so this is a big deal.  That compared very favorably to 33% on the doctor standard care arm, again a 2X improvement.  To be clear, this does not mean that those who completed the Weight Watchers arm were actively doing the program each week for 12 months.  It merely meant that they showed up for the last weigh-in of the research project.  

Does this mean that Weight Watchers some how does a better job than doctors in treating patients?  Of course not.  What it does mean is that Weight Watchers has a structure in place that makes providing weekly support, education and weigh-in's very straight forward and easy to facilitate.  Further, Weight Watchers has meetings literally everywhere in each of its markets making it pretty convenient for the vast majority of doctors' patients.  What this study conclusively showed is that the combination of doctor and Weight Watchers is a winning one in creating weight loss that is significant from a health perspective.  The clear implication of this is that there is a valuable partnership to be formed between doctors and Weight Watchers.  

It worked for me, and the study showed that it can work for most others.  

What role (if any) has your doctor played in your weight loss process?  

Cheers,

dk