HEAT: Healthy eating and training

Researcher profiles:

• Professor Jim Mann
• Associate Professor Rachael Taylor
• Associate Professor Sheila Williams
• Dr Kirsten McAuley
• Dr Kelly Dale
• Dr Alex Chisolm

Long term effective weight management

Long-term effective weight management remains a difficult target. While most people are able to lose weight in the short-term, few long-term options have been successful.

We urgently need information regarding the most cost effective programmes for overweight and obese individuals to maintain their weight loss.

Applying HEAT

The HEAT study involved 200 women who were randomly allocated to one of two approaches for providing support for maintenance of weight loss, and one of two dietary approaches for maintaining weight loss.

The support programmes involved different types of support and differed vastly in cost. We aimed to determine if a lower cost, but still intensively frequent type of support was as successful as the expensive expert dependent Finnish approach (used in the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study - Diabetes. 2003;52:2532-8) .

The dietary programmes included one diet based on the high carbohydrate (CHO) diet, but specifically promoting low glycaemic index carbohydrates versus an alternative approach based on a moderate CHO, high monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA) diet promoting low glycaemic load.

Inexpensive support programme as effective

Amongst our findings we found that a relatively inexpensive programme involving nurse support is as effective as a more resource-intensive program for weight maintenance over a 2-year period. Diets of different macronutrient composition produced comparable beneficial effects in terms of weight loss maintenance.

Clinical trial

This study is registered at http://www.clinicaltrials.gov with the identifier: NCT00128336

Related project

SWIFT: Support strategies for whole-food diets, intermittent fasting and training

Publications

Dale, K.S., McAuley, K.A., Taylor, R.W., Williams, S.M., Farmer, V.L., Hansen, P., Vorgers, S.M., Chisholm, A.W., Mann, J.I. (2009). Determining optimal approaches for weight maintenance: a randomized controlled trial. CMAJ, 9; 180, E39-E46.
View abstract

Dale, K.S., Mann, J.I., McAuley, K.A., Williams, S.M., Farmer, V.L. (2009). Sustainability of lifestyle changes following an intensive lifestyle intervention in insulin resistant adults: Follow-up at 2-years. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 18(1), 114-20.
View abstract