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Evaluating differences in the clinical impact of a free online weight loss programme, a resource-intensive commercial weight loss programme and an active control condition: a parallel randomised controlled trial
journal contribution
posted on 2019-12-12, 14:39 authored by Aidan Innes, Greg Thomson, Mary Cotter, James KingJames King, Niels Vollaard, Ben KellyBackground Finding effective intervention strategies to combat rising obesity levels could significantly reduce the burden that obesity and associated non-communicable diseases places on both individuals and the National Health Service. Methods In this parallel randomised-controlled trial, 76 participants who are overweight or obese (50 female) were given free access to a fitness centre for the duration of the 12-week intervention and randomised to one of three interventions. The commercial intervention, the Healthy Weight Programme, (HWP, n=25, 10/15 men/women) consisted of twelve 1-hour nutrition coaching sessions with a nutritionist delivered as a mixture of group and 1 to 1 sessions. In addition, twice-weekly exercise sessions (24 in total) were delivered by personal trainers for 12 weeks. The NHS intervention (n=25, 8/17 men/women) consisted of following an entirely self-managed 12-week online NHS resource. The GYM intervention (n=26, 8/18 men/women) received no guidance or formal intervention. All participants were provided with a gym induction for safety and both the NHS and GYM participants were familiarised with ACSM physical activity guidelines by way of a hand-out. Results The overall follow-up rate was 83%. Body mass was significantly reduced at post-intervention in all groups (HWP: N=18, -5.17±4.22 kg, NHS: N=21 -4.19±5.49 kg; GYM: N=24 - 1.17±3.00 kg; p < 0.001) with greater reductions observed in HWP and NHS groups compared to GYM (p<0.05). Out with body mass and BMI, there were no additional statistically significant time x intervention interaction effects Conclusions This is the first study to evaluate the efficacy of both a free online NHS self-help weight-loss tool and a commercial weight loss programme that provides face-to-face nutritional support and supervised exercise. The findings suggest that both interventions are superior to an active control condition with regard to eliciting short-term weight-loss.
Funding
Nuffield Health Charity (Registered Charity Numbers: 205533 in 439 England and Wales and SC041793 in Scotland)
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
BMC Public HealthVolume
19Publisher
BioMed CentralVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
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© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by BioMed Centralunder the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2019-12-10Publication date
2019-12-23Copyright date
2019ISSN
1471-2458Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr James King Deposit date: 11 December 2019Article number
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