By sharing their health data with a coach capable of providing regular feedback on the situation, involvement becomes stronger. The advice provided, but also the pressure of not wanting to fail in the objectives set, increase the chances of keeping commitments over time.
-1608033428.jpg "To lose weight, share your health data with a professional")
- Sharing your data with a health professional allows you to receive personalized advice that helps you achieve your goals.
- For people who want to lose weight, this solution allows you to keep a steady pace and not give up.
Creating healthy habits and succeeding in sticking to them over time is not easy. With the prospect of the new year, good resolutions like doing more sport or eating better can last a few weeks before completely disappearing. Researchers from the Center for the Science of Weight, Diet and Lifestyle (WELL Center) at the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University (USA) believe that personalized support with a counselor who has access to your health data in real time can be the best solution to keep your commitments, especially to lose weight sustainably. The results of their study were published in the journal obesity.
Monitor your parameters daily
For this study, researchers enlisted 87 adult participants as part of a 12-month weight loss program. In order to best follow their progress, the participants had to self-monitor in three ways: in wearing a fitness tracker daily, weighing themselves on a smart scale and logging all the food they ate in a smartphone app.
During the first three months, the participants followed a weekly course in order to acquire the right reflexes. Then, all exchanges with the researchers were limited to a weekly SMS and a monthly phone call with their coach. “This is the period that is often difficult for people who want to lose weight.says Meghan Butryn, lead author of the study, associate professor at the College of Arts and Sciences and director of research at the WELL Center. This is where the weight initially lost tends to start coming back..”
During the maintenance phase, the participants were randomized so that half of them worked with a trainer who had access to their self-monitoring data, which allowed him to give personalized feedback during phone calls and text messages. For the other half of the participants, the coaches did not have access to the data, which made the experiment much less accurate.
The weight of personalized coaching
Thanks to the self-monitoring data, the coaches were able to establish contact with the participants in order to re-motivate them. Thus, each week, he could ask them why certain set objectives were not achieved, and see with them the strategies to adopt to achieve this.
After a year, the researchers analyzed the results. While the weight loss was similar in both groups at baseline, it split into two after six months. People who did not receive personalized advice from trainers because they did not have access to data gained an average of two kilos over the last six months. On the other hand, among people whose coaches had access to the data, weight loss was continuous for a full year.
“We wanted to know if maintaining weight loss would be better when trainers could see data and provide feedback and a sense of accountability to participants, which could help maintain high levels of motivation to maintain behaviors. healthy food and physical activity”, emphasizes Meghan Butryn.
For Meghan Butryn, although the sample is limited, it proves that sharing the data with a professional helps participants make the right choices to maintain their weight loss effort. However, other questions remain unanswered, such as whether this same method would achieve the same results if the participants’ treating physician had access to the activity data. This new parameter will be the subject of further research.
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