Does adherence to a motivational counseling program impact weight loss?
Abstract
Objective: Given the health-care cost and prevalence of preventative health disparities across today’s population, it is not surprising that the recent health-care legislation has aimed to address preventative health initiatives. Specifically, weight management counseling is a preventative health initiative that the affordable care act has emphasized. We evaluated motivational counseling (MC) for weight management in a college aged population and to what extent adherence to the program impacts the magnitude of weight loss.
Methods: A total of 120 southeastern US college students from 2009 to 2013 participated in weekly counseling sessions lasting 15-30 min focused on weight management.
Results: The study findings indicated a 51% greater weight loss in participants with greater adherence to the MC program. There were no differences across gender or race.
Conclusion: These findings indicate that motivation counseling is an effect modality for addressing obesity-related preventive health disparities.
Keywords:
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).