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Miracle diets don't work
Simple Steps teachers promote sustainable lifestyle changes
Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by SUSAN CRATON
From left, Jennifer Drury, Becky Sutay and Christine Jaffurs, teachers of Health Connection's Simple Steps for Weight Loss, say their students lose, on average, about 10 pounds while taking the 10-week course, which is offered three times each year.
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Cut out dairy foods or carbohydrates?
Try the miracle soup diet?
Fast or take diet pills?
The three women sitting in the Health Connections meeting room wrinkle their noses and shake their heads "no" as each diet approach is mentioned. They're not fans.
"Anything that says ‘miracle' … is not going to work," said Becky Sutay.
"We're doing these fad diets instead of true lifestyle change," said Jennifer Drury, of many people's troubled relationship with food.
Drury, a personal trainer and community health educator, teaches the Simple Steps for Weight Loss class at Health Connections in Leonardtown, an outreach of St. Mary's Hospital, along with Christine Jaffurs, a community health educator who specializes in behavior modification, and Sutay, a dietician. The 10-week class is offered by Health Connections three times a year.
The first class in the current offering is meeting tonight. But there are no openings for more students.
In fact, there's a waiting list. It's because it's January, the teachers say. It's the season to make resolutions. People want to lose weight … fast.
One can almost sense Drury, Jaffurs and Sutay shaking their heads at this idea also. Losing weight fast is not what they teach.
"We teach people how to have sustainable behavior change to maintain their weight loss," Drury said.
Sutay says that when they start with a new class of students, many of them are sedentary. And many of them have tried fad diets. "A lot said they did get results," Sutay said of these drastic forms of dieting. "But they couldn't stick with it."
"We don't condone cutting out any of the food groups," Drury said.
Fad dieting doesn't work because people aren't willing to live like that forever, Sutay said. It doesn't result in permanent, sustainable change, which is what Sutay and the other teachers are after.
"A lot of them are looking for a miracle, and they want us to give them step-by-step instructions how to get there," Sutay said.
That's not exactly what the students get. But they don't leave empty handed. "We give them the tools to fix themselves," Sutay said.
Using a combination of group support, behavior modification, optional weekly weigh-ins, body composition measurements, nutrition education and a little cooking demonstration, portion education, food journaling and exercise, the average weight loss for a student in the course is about 10 pounds. Teachers discourage the students from losing more than one or two pounds a week.
As a further incentive, the students who reach their weight-loss goal and attend at least seven of the classes get half of the $100 registration fee returned.
What works
During the four years of teaching Simple Steps, the three women have observed two characteristics of the successful student – they are faithful about writing down what they eat and they attend the classes.
"Those are our successes," Jaffurs said.
The need for accountability, apparently, is key for many people. Writing down what they eat makes them admit how much they are eating and examine their choices. It works.
During the last class offered in 2008, Sutay also kept a food journal with her students as she tried to shed a few extra pounds herself. She lost 20 pounds, and she attributes her loss to the food journaling.
"It makes you think twice," Jaffurs said.
The class doesn't expect students to count calories in these journals, but does insist on honest portion size reporting and the time it is eaten.
"We don't want them to go more than four hours without eating," Jaffurs said.
The reason for this, Sutay explained is that a body needs a steady supply of fuel. "Metabolism is like a fire … you want to keep it stoked," she said.
Drury is responsible for teaching the students to forego their sedentary ways. "It's a huge barrier for most of them," Drury said of the exercise component of the class. "The idea of adding one more thing to their schedule is very, very daunting to the individual."
But the class' emphasis isn't necessarily on hard-core workouts. "Just move more," Drury said.
Each student is given a pedometer and is asked to try to get in 10,000 steps a day, which is the recommendation of the American College of Sports Medicine. That extra walking can come from parking farther away from a building, taking short walks on breaks, taking the stairs instead of an elevator.
Students can even meet 30 minutes before the weekly class to take a quick walk about the hospital together.
Drury, Sutay and Jaffurs recommended two Web sites as resources for those trying to break some bad habits and add some good ones as it relates to their health this new year.
Mypyramid.gov is a site maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that offers personalized eating plans and interactive tools to help plan and assess food choices. The second recommended Web site is sparkpeople.com, which offers a personalized diet and fitness plan for users, as well as a calorie counter and exercise trackers.
Another resource might be the Simple Steps for Weight Loss Program at Health Connections. The next class starts in April.
