Louisiana patients, who enrolled in a Pennington Biomedical weight loss study tailored to low-income residents, maintained at least a five percent decrease in body weight over a two year period. Lead researcher, Dr. Peter Katzmarzyk, said health coaches had weekly sessions with 452 patients on solving their biggest barriers to weight loss.
“If the patient was having trouble getting physical activity,they would help them with that. If they were having trouble controlling their diet, they could help them with that, or eating at night, stress eating or these sorts of things. They could focus on these types of issues,” said Katzmarzyk.
A control group was given “usual” care, that was not personalized, and only lost a half a percent of their body weight.
Katzmarzyk said the program sent health coaches to the patients’ primary care clinics and conducted zoom calls so that participants didn’t have to travel far for help.
“These were not people from Pennington going out and teaching people, these were health coaches who were trained from the communities that they lived in,” said Katzmarzyk.
The program was conducted at 18 Louisiana primary care clinics in both urban and rural areas.
Katzmarzyk said a major emphasis was showing patients that eating healthy doesn’t have to be expensive.
“We were able to teach them all about portion control foods, how to shop, and how to create portion-controlled foods essentially from the normal grocery store,” said Katzmarzyk.
