Transcript

Social Strategies for Weight Loss

Mei Lin Fung
I participated as one of 200 people in a 28-week program. Each of us were randomly assigned to one of two programs: either learning maintenance skills first, weight maintenance skills, and then experiencing weight loss or doing weight lost first. I was assigned to the maintenance first program which included 8 weeks of learning weight maintenance skills and then 20 weeks of weight loss.

We focused on lifestyle habits. The key things were making peace with the scale, learning to eat mindfully, and the concept of landmark walks and enjoying today. Our stability skills were about avoiding extremes, persevering knowing that small changes would add up, and anticipating disruptions so that we could navigate them. The thing that I liked best about this program were the landmark walks. It was a concept that I had never encountered before. And this is the idea of taking ten minute walks at various points during the day where you don't to change clothes or go back and shower, but you can take a walk to somewhere interesting.

We set goals each week for ourselves and talked about whether we had met those goals or achieved part of those goals. And I've given an example here about monitoring weight and mindfully savoring food and the technique of breathing and savoring food three times before putting it in our mouths to eat. I liked the whole fact that we had actually four goals which included only one of them as weight loss. The goals were about improving nutrition, increasing our physical activity averaging 30 minutes a day, to increase our steps to 6 thousand from where we were, and to improve our quality of life in addition to managing our weight.

The most surprising find is who was able to maintain their weight loss. Another weight loss cohort that we were part of it turns out from the online questionnaires they could identify which of us had family support and friend support. Those who had both supports, 70% were able to sustain some level of weight loss. Those with family support but no support from friends, only 40% were able to. And this was a surprising finding: of each weight loss cohort, those with no family support and no friend support 80% were able to in fact sustain weight loss. And we put that down to having a weight loss cohort for people who in the past had had no support for maintaining weight loss.