A new study shows that genes, government policies, the economy of the country and the environment play a significant role in Americans' weight issue.
According to Dr. Jamy Ard, co-director of the new adult Weight Management Center at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and leader of two non-surgical weight-control programs, weight loss for Americans needs to be much more than just exercise and diet.
"My job is to build a specialty program that deals with medical weight management, providing a long-term care model to treat obesity as the disease it is," said Dr. Ard.
Proper education needs to be given to not just people facing weight issues, but also their family. It requires a long-term commitment to change of lifestyle incorporating better eating and exercising habits.
Nowadays, bariatric surgery is seen as a quick solution to obesity. But people at the Wake Forest Baptist, a weight-loss program that shares Ard's views on the subject, think otherwise. They encourage patients that come in for a surgery to lose and maintain their weight for at least a month before the surgery.
"The goal is making those lifestyle changes,'" said Fernandez, who was a classmate of Ard's at Duke Medical School. "Obesity is a disease. Surgery is the most successful treatment, but without life modification -- portion control, healthy choices and exercise -- even surgery will not be successful in the long term."
This is done so that people who undergo this surgery don't put on weight again after the surgery by going back to their old eating habits.
"We offer a monthly post-op support group - group therapy so to speak - and most of those patients do really well,'' Fernandez said. "We don't see a lot of recidivism."
With victims of obesity increasing in numbers at a very rapid rate, Ard fears that the next generation will experience a lower life expectancy.
"But you can't stop the forces of innovation and capitalism and entrepreneurship," Ard said. "As long as people are going to be incentivized to make money with new technologies and labor-saving devices and new food products, you're going to have these things and they're going to keep coming faster and faster."
"So our job is not to say, 'Hey, we can't have any sugar-containing beverages because we think those are bad.' Food is around to be enjoyed. We have to be able to adjust, to come up with new strategies to deal with the new environment that we're in and new policies to help us navigate these new challenges, leading to a healthier population overall."
