Oregon Public Broadcasting

If hours at the gym and diets aren’t quite working, it might be time to try some personal intervention. A new study found that people trying to lose weight were more likely to keep it off if they had outside support.  Bilal Qureshi has more.

Researchers at Portland’s Kaiser Center for Health Research followed more than 1,000 people over three years as they tried to lose weight. One group tried to lose pounds the old-fashioned way.  The others regularly met with health counselors. Portlander Bob Brandon was one of them.

Brandon: “And I would be weighed in her presence so she could record that on her chart as well as tell her how much exercise I had been doing.whether or not I had been filling out a food diary to show what I’d been eating every day.”

Over the course of the study, Brandon lost fifty pounds. But more importantly, he kept the weight off.  Researchers found that people like Brandon, who had outside support, were two and a half times as likely to maintain their new weight.

The full results of the study are in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.