Weight Loss
If you’ve struggled to lose weight, you’re not alone. Every person’s body is different and the routines that work for one person don’t always work well for others.
Weight loss can be difficult, frustrating, or even risky depending on the methods an individual follows, so if you want to ensure that you’re working towards safe, effective weight loss, medical assistance might be the right option for you.
What is Medical Weight Loss?
Being overweight or obese is not an uncommon condition, and because the process of losing weight can be incredibly challenging, many individuals struggle to achieve the results they want on their own.
To effectively lose weight and reclaim the components of their health, some individuals who have struggled to lose weight seek the guidance and supervision of a medical professional in order to achieve adequate results.
When a medical professional provides a patient with guidance, medications, or other medical-grade weight loss assistance, this process is called medical weight loss (or medically-assisted weight loss).
Weight Loss Challenges
Thousands of people are trying to lose excess weight at any given time, and unfortunately, it’s not an easy process. A lot of work goes into following a weight loss program and for some individuals, certain challenges are bound to affect the overall outcomes they see.
Common struggles that impede weight loss include:
Poor Diet Tracking: Keeping track of one’s caloric intake is an important part of maintaining an effective weight loss program, but forgetting to track a certain item or improperly measuring the serving size can offset calorie counting.
Poor Diet Content: Some individuals struggle to lose weight because their diet itself is subpar. For example, a diet may be lacking protein, not encourage enough hydration, or might allow for too many unhealthy substitutions (like excess sugar or alcohol).
Exercise Setbacks: Exercising enough to burn the calories consumed in a day is a big part of successfully losing weight, but it’s also the hardest part. Plenty of people find that they aren’t doing the right types of exercise, or they’re not performing enough repetitions. In other situations, exercising at all is a challenge, due to injuries, disabilities, or incredibly busy schedules getting in the way.
Existing Medical Conditions: Medical conditions and certain medications can add another level of complexity when it comes to losing weight. Whether the condition itself contributes to weight gain or the medication used to treat it causes side effects that make losing weight hard, this issue can really get in the way.
Poor Sleep Quality: Not getting enough sleep can trigger the production of stress hormones, which make it harder to lose weight and easier to gain it.
Excessive Stress: In addition to the hormones triggered by stress, an excessively stressful lifestyle can make stress snacking or binge-eating harder to avoid.
Weight Loss Methods
Because every individual is facing a unique situation in terms of losing weight, it only makes sense that medical services evolve to meet the needs of each weight loss patient who seeks medically-assisted weight loss options.
There are several methods that an individual can pursue in order to lose excess weight with the help of a medical professional. To come to the right decision, it’s imperative for patients to carefully and thoroughly discuss their concerns and needs with a practitioner they trust.
Let’s explore a few common weight loss methods that might interest you if you’re seeking medical intervention in order to lose weight.
Strict Weight Loss Programs:
Many medical weight loss programs assist patients by providing them with a clear schedule to follow and routine check-in opportunities to ensure their adherence. These program schedules include dietary guidelines, menus, recipes, calorie suggestions, and exercise routines.
Weight Loss Medications:
Several brands of medically-approved weight loss medications exist, and most take the form of either an injection or an oral supplement. Along with following a prescribed diet and exercise guide, weight loss medications can supplement the results a patient can expect to see in a given timeline.
Outpatient or Minimally-Invasive Procedures:
For patients who are wary about having weight loss surgery, some incision-free options might be worth considering. For example, the intragastric sleeve is a balloon apparatus that is inserted into the patient’s stomach to take up space and encourage longer satiation after eating. An endoscopic gastroplasty, on the other hand, places several sutures in the patient’s stomach to decrease its size. This procedure is performed laparoscopically so that there are only a couple of very small incisions required.
Weight Loss Surgery:
Usually, weight loss surgery is reserved for the most challenging weight loss cases, as these procedures are more invasive than the options mentioned above. Restrictive or Malabsorptive Bariatric Surgery is one of two surgical options for individuals with a BMI greater than 40 (35 if weight-related conditions exist).
Other surgical options for weight loss include the gastric sleeve, gastric band, duodenal switch, or gastric bypass surgery.
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