Weight Loss

Why does BackFit offer a weight loss program?

Obesity is a medical condition that concurrently affects approximately 1 in 4 Americans, including 12.5 million children. This figure continues to increase between 20% and 32% each year.

Being overweight isn’t only a cosmetic problem. It increases the risk of various life-threatening conditions. Obesity can increase your risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. You may also feel a reduced quality of life from digestive problems, sexual problems, sleep problems, fatigue, anxiety, depression, shame or guilt, and/or social isolation.

Here at BackFit Health + Spine, we consider the whole body and how it might be affecting your livelihood. In a very direct way, weight can affect how your muscles and joints function. Specifically, the more weight you put on your joints, the more wear and tear they are going to take. Osteoarthritis is a much higher risk with obesity.

By addressing obesity at our integrated clinics, we can address the root cause of a number of other conditions and help you avoid future illness. BackFit Health + Spine is here to be your partner in weight loss.

What are the causes of obesity?

Obesity is primarily behavioral and lifestyle choices. When you eat more calories per day than you can burn through normal activities and exercise, your body stores the excess calories as fat.

Food choice is also a major factor in caloric intake and weight gain. A diet that lacks fruit and vegetables and has oversized portions, such as fast food, contributes greatly to weight gain. Empty liquid calories, like soda or alcohol, also provide little or no nutritional value and do not make you feel full.

A sedentary lifestyle can also easily contribute to obesity. If you spend a lot of time at a desk or in front of a TV or other screen, you are more likely to not get enough daily activity to burn more calories than you take in.

What are the risk factors for obesity?

While obesity is mostly caused by behavior, there are a few other reasons you may struggle with weight gain. You may experience hormonal, metabolic, hereditary, or other factors including:

• Genetics and family influence: Not only might you inherit how your body stores fat, how efficiently it converts calories to energy, appetite regulation, and calorie burn from exercise, but people tend to share similar eating and activity patterns as your parents.
• Social-economics: Without question, unhealthy food is cheaper. You may also not have access to safe exercise. Healthy food and healthy cooking may also not have been taught to you. There is also an association that obese people tend to have friends that are also obese.
• Age: While children can be overweight, the older you get, the higher at-risk you are for obesity. As you age, hormonal changes, less physical activity, lower muscle mass, and decreased metabolism can contribute to weight gain.

Other factors include pregnancy (losing weight postpartum), quitting smoking, lack of good sleep, stress, healthy microbiome (gut), and short-term and yo-yo dieting.

What weight loss treatments does BackFit offer?

First, we will identify and confirm a diagnosis of obesity. A rough diagnosis can be accomplished with a quick BMI (body mass index) calculation. However, you may have a BMI that is in the overweight or obese status, but you do not actually have excess body fat. We may perform other tests, such as a skinfold thickness, waist-to-hip comparison, order imaging such as ultrasound, or order cholesterol and glucose blood tests.

By doing a whole-body analysis, we will be able to recommend a treatment plan. A few of our treatment offerings include:

• Micronutrient testing: We offer a blood test to analyze your nutritional intake. You may be missing key vitamins and minerals that contribute to malabsorption and slow metabolism.

• Food sensitivity testing: Also via blood testing, you can get a food allergy test. Not only will this help us develop meal plans with you, but you may be consuming foods that you are allergic to, causing internal inflammation of the gut and other organs.

• Vitamin injections: Micronutrient deficiencies may make it more difficult to lose weight. We provide a wide range of vitamin and mineral injections and supplements to help get you on track.

• Physical therapy: As exercise and activity is one of the main preventative measures of obesity, we may teach you an exercise routine to help bring your activity level up.

• Chiropractic: Perhaps surprisingly, chiropractic adjustments can help with weight loss indirectly. By providing adjustments to your joints, you will likely feel less joint and other pain while doing activities, making it easier to lose weight.

• Weight loss Rx: In addition to the above, our medical team may also prescribe weight loss control medication such as Semaglutide, a peptide that help to curb appetite and increase weight loss . This is usually for patients that have tried other methods before that did not work, their BMI is over 27.0, or they have other obesity-related health issues. Semaglutide, marketed under the brand name Ozempic, is an injectable medication that has shown remarkable success in promoting weight loss for individuals battling obesity. By mimicking the actions of the body’s natural hormones, Semaglutide helps to reduce appetite, control food cravings, and optimize metabolism.

First and foremost, the BackFit Family is here to support you through your weight loss journey to get you to your healthy weight. Whatever your weight loss goal is, we are here to help you with a long-term lifestyle weight loss plan.