UVA using grant funds to help people in rural communities lose weight

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - The University of Virginia School of Medicine and the University of South Carolina are receiving a multi-million-dollar grant from NIH to help improve behavioral obesity treatments for rural communities.

“What’s most important, really, is improving health,” UVA Professor of Public Health Becca Krukowski said Tuesday, November 14.

Krukowski says UVA researchers are looking at the problem from a new perspective, and have developed an online behavioral weight management program.

“These programs typically achieve weight losses of about 5% to 7%, and that degree of weight loss is associated with improvements in blood pressure and glucose, and all other factors that are associated with health,” Krukowski said.

People in these programs will be taught skills learned from the past 40 years of research. The goal is to adjust what they do to get what they want.

“Those are things like tracking what you eat and tracking your physical activity, but also boosting your physical activity, having a calorie goal, learning how to manage stress, how to manage the holidays, and restaurant eating, and all of those challenges that tend to come up in about a six-month program,” Krukowski said.

Krukowski says the online approach is especially important for people in more-remote communities, where in-person weight loss programs are limited.

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