Having strong support services available to you while you’re making lifestyle changes to promote weight loss and improve your health can often mean the difference between success and failure.
Research has found that people with strong support systems are more likely to achieve their weight loss goals and maintain them over the long term. Because of the importance of support systems during the weight loss phase, the The Institute for Weight Management has several support options:
Medical Support
Dr. Chhabra’s expertise in the field of bariatric medicine and knowledge surrounding the science and physiology of obesity will serve to help you more pounds to lose.
All of our programs are very low in calories and monitored by our physician on a regular basis. This is especially important for those with health conditions such as diabetes mellitus or high blood pressure. Often a person’s prescription medications need adjustment while starting a very low-calorie program such as Optifast. Your safety is our number one concern.
Dr. Chhabra may prescribe certain prescription medications that will help to control an overactive appetite and control emotional eating. The overall result is that people find it easier to stick with our structured meal plans and they rapidly lose weight.
Nutritional Support
Grasping the basic principles of healthy eating and good nutrition is crucial for successful weight loss and long-term weight maintenance. People come to us with varying degrees of nutritional knowledge. You may have already been to a Physician or dietitian to seek advice on weight loss, or know a lot about counting calories and grams of fat and carbohydrates.
What do we do?
One of our tasks is to fill in the gaps in your nutrition knowledge base. Our aim is not to overwhelm you with a lot of useless information. But, rather give practical nutrition information that you can use on a daily basis to make better food choices, limit portion sizes and feel satisfied at the same time.
Assisting you with advice on meal planning for “difficult” social or job-related events is an important part of what we do. We provide practical solutions for problematic situations. Such as the need to entertain business clients in restaurants, or dealing with pressure from loved ones to eat at family gatherings. We will help you troubleshoot these kinds of situations. You will learn to master the skills and strategies to help you get through tough food situations.
Our nutrition counseling and support is “problem-oriented” in nature. After reviewing your eating habits and patterns, we focus on finding simple solutions that you can easily adopt. For example, simply changing your daily schedule of eating will likely enhance your weight loss. Many people wait too long between meals and snacks, or are “saving up calories” during the day for heavy episodes of nighttime eating. We will show you why you need to eat frequently throughout the day. In order to optimize your metabolism, ensure a steady weight loss and enhance your energy level. We repeatedly work with you on the planning skills that are crucial to weight loss and long-term maintenance.
Behavioral Support
Short-term success in losing weight requires making an effort on a daily basis to change routine personal habits relating to food and exercise. Long-term success involves making some permanent lifestyle changes.
The group sessions and one-on-one behavioral counseling are designed well. They will help you figure out what eating habits are adversely affecting your health and weight. Once we have zeroed in on what your personal difficulties are, we provide practical problem-solving techniques. This will help you change your thinking.
Eating as a comfort tool in response to stress, or “emotional eating”, is a common problem. We provide a safe and non-judgmental atmosphere. Here you can explore the reasons why you may be overeating or making poor food choices. This will begin a process to break old behavior patterns that prevent you from moving forward.
We utilize established psychological principles and methods. They will help you make permanent changes in your daily habits regarding food and exercise. Our five-year experience in helping people lose weight has told us that a person’s individual success is highly linked to their strong personal commitment.
We are here to support you every step of the way on your journey.
Metabolic Support
Metabolic support means optimizing your body’s cellular and metabolic processes to become more efficient and promote fat-burning to achieve better weight loss.
Losing weight can be a significant challenge for many obese people. They have several underlying metabolic abnormalities that need to be addressed in order to achieve success.
One major metabolic factor that makes it difficult for obese people to lose weight is called Insulin Resistance. Insulin is the major hormone responsible for transporting blood sugar from the diet into tissues of the body. When present, insulin resistance results in a person’s body tissues becoming less sensitive (hence, more resistant). As a result, dietary carbohydrates (sugar) from food cannot adequately enter the body’s tissues and burn as an energy source. But, rather it gets converted into fat and stored in the body.
All our weight loss programs, including Optifast, address the issue of Insulin Resistance on the metabolic level. Our carbohydrate-restricted plans restore the body’s sensitivity to insulin to promote fat burning as opposed to fat storage. While on our dietary plan, the body is more efficient in deriving energy from fat stores, and people lose weight more rapidly.