Almost everyone who’s ever gone on a diet or spent weeks in the gym trying to lose weight knows that shedding even a few pounds is anything but easy. If you look to friends or the internet for advice, you’ll eventually encounter a common mantra: “calories in, calories out,” meaning that weight loss is largely determined by the choices that you make in the kitchen.
Calorie-counting certainly has its place and role—but it isn’t the end-all and be-all of weight loss.
If you’re struggling to lose weight or keep pounds from coming back, you may need to look further than traditional dieting. At Core Medicine of Idaho, we employ advanced medical weight management techniques that help you lose weight by designing a plan that accounts for your unique body, biology, and goals. Contact us today to request your appointment and take your first steps toward a happier, healthier tomorrow.
The Difference Between Medical Weight Management and Dieting
If you go online looking for advice on the ideal diet, you’ll likely stumble across a multitude of websites advocating very different approaches to eating. Some emphasize rich and well-balanced meals, while others make broad claims about the benefits of abstaining from certain kinds of foods. What they all tend to have in common is:
- A uniform approach to calorie-counting and restriction
- Limited to no support for people actively trying to lose weight
- An emphasis on short-term gains over long-term success
If anything, going on a diet without guidance can lead to some rather unexpected results. People who succeed in losing weight, for instance, often struggle to keep it off. This is termed the “yo-yo effect,” and it is much more common than you might think. In fact, some studies have shown that most people who try to lose weight by dieting lose their progress within a matter of 1 to 5 years, sometimes surpassing their pre-diet weight.
Medical weight management, in contrast, is a much more personalized process. Instead of making big assumptions about what kinds of foods are best for everyone, medical weight management plans are supervised by a health care professional capable of giving safer and more personalized recommendations.
The 3 Big Advantages of Medical Weight Loss
The term “medical weight management” sounds technical, but it simply refers to any professionally-guided program that helps you lose weight without surgery. Unlike traditional dieting, medical weight loss plans are often comprehensive, accounting not only for your diet but your lifestyle and mental health, too. In other words, medical weight loss is about what works best for you—not a friend, a coworker, or a stranger on the internet.
Here are three of the biggest advantages of a medical weight management plan over conventional dieting:
1. Your Health Plan is Personalized
Commercial diet programs are a one-size-fits-all solution to concerns that often go far beyond the sorts of food you do and don’t eat. Fad diets like the “keto diet” and “paleo diet” may well help some people, but they are fundamentally incapable of accounting for factors such as:
- Your base metabolic rate (BMR)
- Nutritional and vitamin deficiencies
- Old injuries, chronic health conditions, and other complications
Many medical weight loss plans make extensive use of tools like hormone panels and metabolic testing, giving your provider a much clearer view of what type of program is going to work best for you.
2. You Can Combine Dieting and Exercise with Medication
The FDA has recently approved a number of effective weight loss medications.
However, none of these drugs are available over-the-counter, in part because they aren’t right for everyone. Other supplements, some of which can be purchased online, are downright dangerous and, in some cases, deadly.
At Core Medicine of Idaho, we go by the science and stay atop the latest research. If you’re struggling to lose weight, we may be able to prescribe common weight-loss medications. These include popular semaglutide-based drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, both of which have been shown to increase weight loss.
3. Our Caldwell Weight Management Team Could Help You Move Past Chronic Health Issues
A typical diet has few considerations: your weight, the type of food you eat, and how many calories go into and out of your body. All of these factors have a lot to do with weight loss, but they completely overlook the possibility that weight gain and weight loss can be severely impacted by health conditions like:
- Diabetes
- Genetic predispositions
- Hormonal imbalances
- Conditions like hypothyroidism
Getting a good understanding of what, if any, underlying conditions you might have typically requires access to high-quality lab services. Our experienced medical weight loss team knows this, which is part of the reason that Core Medicine of Idaho has its own in-house laboratory, alongside a pharmacy stocked with prescription weight loss medications.
You don’t have to let factors outside your control dictate your weight: if you have concerns about your health, we’re here to help, and we can do it without making you spend half your day in a waiting room.