Why a 30-Second Chat Could be The Secret to Weight Loss

A study has shown how a brief medical consultation is enough to prompt people to shed the pounds

21 March, 2018
Why a 30-Second Chat Could be The Secret to Weight Loss

From dieting blogs to #fitspiration on Instagram, there's no shortage of healthy living advice out there. While there's no doubt this serves as a great source of motivation, it turns out a 30-second chat could be all that's needed to prompt people to lose weight.

Researchers from the University of Oxford carried out a trial to establish whether a brief consultation from a doctor was an effective way to reduce bodyweight in patients with obesity, reports the BBC.

The results, which have been published on the Lancet, found that doctors who spent 30 seconds telling patients they needed to lose weight had a positive effect, with some shedding 10% of their body weight after being offered a free healthy lifestyle programme.​

"We trained physicians to offer referral to an effective weight management programme, ensure that the patient left with an appointment, and offer follow-up, and to do so within 30s," the study explained. "We showed that such brief interventions were highly acceptable, with most patients finding opportunistic intervention appropriate and helpful and very few finding it inappropriate and unhelpful."

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The researchers also noted that the doctor's 30-second advice encouraged most people to lose weight during the year of follow-up, which could go a long way towards the effort to reduce the population's mean weight.

Professor Paul Aveyard, from the University of Oxford, described these results as "substantial."

"If we were year-on-year to knock 2.4kg off the heaviest people in society then that would have a very big effect in health terms," he told the BBC.

However, Dr Imran Rafi, from the Royal College of GPs, has warned that more must be done to tackle obesity in the UK.

"If this scheme is low-cost and effective, which this research claims it is, it makes sense to consider it on a wider scale," he said. "We must understand that while some patients in this study did benefit from a referral to a weight-loss programme, it won't work for everyone and shouldn't be considered as a blanket solution to curb growing levels of obesity."

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Credit: Cosmopolitan
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