Understanding the Advantages You Get with Medical Weight Loss
If you diet and exercise but the weight still doesn’t come off, look into medical weight loss. At I & R Medical Services, Dr. Roza Israel can create a custom weight-loss plan that considers your lifestyle and medical history.
Medical weight loss is a treatment option to lose weight under the guidance of a licensed, health care professional, usually a medical doctor, nurse, or nurse practitioner. Primary care physicians, who already have their patients’ trust and can focus on overall health, are uniquely suited to helping obese and overweight patients lose weight.
Each program is slightly different, but most include these features.
At your first meeting, we take your medical history, review current medications with an eye toward which drugs may be influencing your weight, and discuss any current medical conditions that make it difficult for you to lose weight and/or would benefit from weight loss.
We conduct a physical examination and may collect a blood sample to determine your current blood sugar and cholesterol levels.
To lose weight, you must burn more calories than you take in. That means you must reduce calories you take in with diet and increase calories that you burn with exercise.
Medical weight loss programs typically include:
- Low-calorie diets containing nutrient-rich foods or meal replacement options
- Exercise programs and goals
- Behavior modification counseling to help you make lifestyle changes
- Prescription appetite suppressants, when deemed appropriate
- Supplements, including B12 injections
The Obesity Action Coalition, which advocates for people suffering from obesity, offers these advantages of medical weight-loss programs.
People in medical weight-loss programs tend to lose 3%-5% more weight than those who direct their own weight loss.
Medication approved for weight loss leads to greater weight loss and more successful maintenance when paired with lifestyle modifications.
Medical weight loss can reduce the severity of sleep apnea and decrease inflammatory markers that predict chronic disease.
Obesity medicine physicians are committed to using evidence-based treatments to help patients lose weight. When you lose weight under physician supervision, you have greater access to a range of treatments provided by referrals to dieticians, bariatric surgeons, and exercise physiologists.
If you eat right and stay active but still can’t drop the extra weight, Dr. Roza Israel and the rest of our medical team at I & R Medical Services can help by offering a variety of medical weight-loss options without surgery. Learn more about medically supervised weight loss by calling the office directly or using the online booking feature.