Weight Loss Clinic Tips

 

The new year is upon us, and with it comes one of the most common resolutions: it’s time to lose weight and get healthier. For many of us, we’ll start the new year off with perfectly good intentions, only to find ourselves drowning in chocolate cake and ice cream before the first week is out. For so many of us, diets are really only struggles in failure, not success. Even if we do lose the weight, most of us don’t keep it off. Is there a better way? There might be.

The weight loss clinic has been around for a long time, ever since the days of the first medically supervised weight loss programs. Today, many of them have come back in different incarnations with new names, but they all have one thing in common. They provide strictly controlled and supervised weight loss in a clinic or medical environment. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this type of weight loss program.

Advantages

* Supervised and controlled

The clinic has a huge advantage, and that is that it’s a supervised environment. Take a moment and be honest with yourself. Are you someone who fails to embrace a sensible eating plan despite your best intentions? Have you tried and failed with one fad diet after another, only to gain even more weight after your initial loss? Have you put your health in danger with dangerous supplements like ephedra, or with starvation diets? If you answer yes to any of these questions, joining a weight loss clinic may be just the thing you need.

In the clinic environment, what you eat will generally be carefully supervised. This won’t entirely eliminate your weight loss struggles forever, but it can give you a jumpstart on a good, healthy eating plan with proper food and the right balance of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Different plans focus on different things, but most of them have at least some focus on nutrition, exercise, lifestyle changes, and behavioral modification focused on helping you change how you eat. Some also include prescribed drugs to help control appetite or weight loss surgery.

* Careful modification

You may be one of those people who simply doesn’t know what good nutrition is. You’ll learn what it is in the weight loss clinic environment, and you’ll likely also learn behavioral changes that will help you avoid reaching for food as a stress reliever. Finally, you’ll also learn how to exercise, starting where you are so that you don’t injure yourself by doing too much too soon.

* Focus on safety

Because the environment is supervised, it’s also quite safe. While it may not be advisable to undertake a strenuous exercise program or take weight loss drugs on your own, it may be perfectly fine to do so as long as you’re supervised. Trying to drastically change what you eat or ramping up your physical activity could be dangerous unless it’s carefully controlled in the weight loss clinic environment.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages to a weight loss clinic program, too.

* It’s temporary

Inevitably, the structured environment of the clinic is going to give way to life on your own. Ideally, you’ve learned enough behavioral changes and knowledge about food to be able to manage on your own outside of that structure. If you haven’t, though, and you need that structure, you could relapse.

* It’s expensive

If you have success, a clinic program is time and money well spent. However, if you don’t, your time in the clinic could be an expensive failure. Weight loss clinics by their very nature are going to be more expensive than other types of weight loss programs, simply because they are so supervised and specialized. That said, if you learn from your time there so that you do make permanent and healthy changes, the weight loss clinic can be very beneficial.