Thursday, April 03, 2008

ACK!

The dietician at our work is interviewing with Kaiser for their medically managed weight loss program. She confessed to me that she has some questions about the program: 1) how the maintenance weight of the participants are determined and 2) whether there was some psychotherapeutic aspect to the program.

As we talked, I learned that it is a program that relies for the first 16 weeks on meal replacements. The calorie intake during this period is (according to the website) is 960 per day. Then in the maintenance period, participants are put on a 1200-1600 calorie plan that involves actual food.

I'm more than a little appalled. This is labeled as a healthy weight program. But there is nothing healthy about very low calorie diets. It's called starvation, however you look at it, and it's dangerous. And there is nothing maintenance in a 1600 calorie diet, especially if you want to be active.

What are they thinking?!

3 comments:

Aravis said...

Scary!

Cody Bones said...

According to the Barbera Walters special the other night, the only medically proven technique to prolong life is a restricted calorie diet. FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Those people were just a tad scary, but it sounds like they will be dancing on my grave.

HistoryGeek said...

Cody - I think that I've seen stuff on those folks. Interestingly, their philosophy runs counter to recent studies that have found that those who are firmly in the "overweight" category have the lowest mortality rates. They start to rise as you branch out on either side of that BMI category (but I just can't tell you how much I despise BMI as a measure).