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Funds awarded to develop weight loss maintenance toolkit
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The European Commission recently awarded more than €4.9 million to a 12-member consortium to develop and evaluate a toolkit that will help people who have lost weight, maintain the weight loss, according to a press release.
“The challenge today is not to help people lose weight — most people can do that,” Berit L. Heitmann, PhD, coordinator of NoHoW and director for the research unit for dietary studies at the Parker Institute of Copenhagen University Hospital, said in the release. “The challenge is to help people maintain their weight loss over a long time. Generally speaking 90% to 95% of all overweight and obese people have had one or more successful weight loss attempts but only 5% to 10% have successfully kept the weight off for more than 5 years.”
A new project, NoHoW, will aim to gather evidence about how people change and sustain new behaviors. Researchers will use the evidence the build a weight loss maintenance toolkit, including mobile apps, web-based tools and inputs from other technologies in order to track feedback from participants to determine which model is most effective for them.
“Online weight loss tools, including mobile phone apps, are now widely available, but they are rarely based on clear scientific evidence of what really works,” James Stubbs, PhD, coordinator of the NoHoW intervention study at the University of Derby, said in the release. “For weight loss measures to work, they must engage and motivate users to lose weight and sustain their weight loss journey, even when the going gets tough and they regain weight. This means developing evidence-based tools to help them cope with stresses, negative emotions and weight relapse that can derail the long-term maintenance of behavior change.”
The toolkit will be used as the central component of a weight loss maintenance program and be tested by participants in Denmark, Portugal and the United Kingdom to determine the most effective tools.
“The success of the NoHoW project’s bid was due to the European Commission’s concern that any research should have a real impact on European obesity,” Stubbs said. “With the current consortium of academic and commercial partners we can directly implement the project results across a wide population, rather than the information getting no further than academic journals. Commercialization of project results will provide much-needed weight loss maintenance services that promote health education and long-term weight management programs and give this expertise to the citizen, making them better able to manage their own weight and health.”