>The two most counterproductive pieces of advice you can give

Few Health Care Professionals have enough time to adequately counsel their overweight patients.  Perhaps even more challenging is knowing how to counsel them, besides simply suggesting another diet.  You want your advice to make a difference, and lead to true, long-term success.

Instead of worrying about what to say when your patients need help, recommend SvelteLife!

• It was developed with only the long-term in mind, targeting true, long-lasting lifestyle changes, health, and weight loss.
• It contains only legitimate, medically-sound principles.
• No pills, supplements, or special meals are sold, required, or recommended.
• It was developed by a physician who has not only had a great deal of experience treating obesity and counseling about weight loss, but the whole program grew out of his own struggles to lose weight (necessity being the mother of invention).

If you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area, the best place to start is to recommend our "SvelteShop" Weight Loss Seminar.  For more information, we invite you to attend one of our "Mini-SvelteShops for Docs."  Think of it as Basic Training for your overweight patients, akin to diabetic teaching for newly-diagnosed diabetics.  Your patient's registration includes a 3-month subscription to SvelteLife Online, which provides the necessary follow-up, troubleshooting, support, education, and accountability, along with the entire SvelteLife Weight Loss System online (and each week participants check in, we give them $2.50 back!).

To recommend our SvelteShops, send your patients to www.SeeYouThin.com (www.CUThin.com also works).  The SvelteShops may be covered by your patient's Health Savings Account (HSA), in which case he or she will likely require a prescription describing medical necessity (due to obesity-related conditions).

If you do not live in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, you may still recommend visiting the website and considering the other SvelteLife Program Options listed.

If you are a physician (or can otherwise write prescriptions), and you have a particularly difficult case you think may require an appetite suppressant, consider only doing so by following the principles outlined at www.SHIELDWeightLoss.com. 

The two most counterproductive pieces of advice you can give:

1. "Go on a diet."  See our EatSvelte™ home page to learn why this is not wise.
2. "Aim for a weight loss of 1-2 pounds a week - that's a safe pace."  Losing 1-2 pounds a week is only safe from a health standpoint; not from the standpoint of being a realistic weight loss pace.  Unfortunately, this advice creates an unrealistic expectation, and sets your patient up for almost inevitable failure when the pace is not kept up (and it seldom, if ever, is for any significant amount of time).  Remember that in order to have long-term weight loss success, one should never make any changes to lose weight that cannot or will not be maintained for the rest of one's life.  Losing 1-2 pounds a week requires a caloric deficit of 500-1000 calories a day, and making that big of a change suddenly, then maintaining that pace forever, is a ridiculous proposal.  The heavier a person is, the more calories he or she must consume to maintain his or her weight.  As such, those who are significantly overweight or obese may be able to lose at that pace for a short period of time.  However, everyone's body is different, and the less one weighs (the closer one is to one's ideal weight), the harder it is to lose weight; as such, it is especially inappropriate to tell someone who is only 10-20 pounds overweight to aim for a weight loss of 1-2 pounds a week.