Background: The prevalence of obesity and associated illnesses is continuously rising in industrialized countries. As a preventive measure, the Lower Austria Health Insurance Fund, together with the Institute of Social Medicine of the Medical University Vienna has launched the weight reduction program "Slim without Diet (SWD)". The Program's aim is to change the participants' eating and exercise habits. The methodical approach is to enhance the individual's self-control so that participants are able to identify, break, and modify false behavior patterns. During this project, the data from 4,053 individuals were descriptively evaluated by using the statistical program SPSS (Version 15).
Results: The scientifically recommended target group regarding Body Mass Index and age was reached and the weight reduction success rate is comparable to similar programs. Follow-up checks of the project carried out 6 and 12 months after the end of the intervention phase showed that participants were able to maintain an average weight loss of 4.26 kg compared to their weight at program-start. The participants who follow the therapy recommendations achieved significantly higher weight loss and weight reduction also correlates with the number of attended group sessions (p < 0.001). The attendance frequency at the follow-up checks, however, shows a decreasing tendency of up to 75 percent.
Conclusion: The results show that there is need to develop new methods to increase motivation and compliance of the participants to achieve long-term success. A first trial in this direction was to implement an additional module - participants had the chance of ongoing contacts after the group sessions have finished. The results until now show that a possible participation in the follow-ups is not significantly affected by ongoing contacts.