ACAP Health’s Innovative Program Is The First Of Its Kind that Satisfies the Affordable Care Act Obesity Counseling Requirement for Employer Sponsored Benefits.
Naturally Slim, ACAP Health’s clinically-proven 10-week weight loss program offered by employers to their employees, is relaunching with expanded programming that now includes a full year of weight loss counseling and health improvement support. The programming will further combat the nation’s battle to curb obesity and diabetes while helping companies comply with the Affordable Care Act’s obesity prevention requirements effective September 2015.
Participants in the current program lost and kept off an average of 10 pounds. And, 40 to 50 percent of participants reversed their metabolic syndrome — a set of preventable disease risk factors that cost employers twice as much per year in medical costs on average compared to those without metabolic syndrome (Source: Milliman Actuarial Analysis.) With the additional counseling and support for one full year, the Naturally Slim program is expected to be even more effective at delivering long-term sustainable weight loss.
“The Naturally Slim program now includes all the key elements of a state-of-the-art behavioral weight loss program and is optimized for metabolic syndrome improvement” according to Tim Church, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., who serves as professor of preventive medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, was previously the Vice President of Medical Research at the Cooper Clinic, and has authored more than 200 research articles on obesity, exercise and preventative health.
Dr. Church, who is also the Chief Medical Officer at ACAP Health, led the design and development of the enhanced program. “It is clear that long-term behavioral support is the most effective method to ensure sustainable weight loss and health improvement,” according to Dr. Church. “Working with employers and delivering the counseling through a digital platform allows the Naturally Slim program to offer the necessary behavioral support to large populations regardless of their location or geographic density.”
The core skill-building principles of the program will still be taught in the first 10 weeks. With the new enhancements, those learned skills are reinforced in subsequent bi-weekly lessons for the first six months and then monthly maintenance lessons for the remainder of the year. Naturally Slim’s year-long program meets the Federal Obesity Treatment Guidelines. The guidelines state that an ideal lifestyle intervention program would include 14 or more counseling sessions in six months with additional subsequent counseling for one complete year of intervention.
Compared to fad diets and other weight loss programs that focus on what to eat, Naturally Slim is a skill-building program that focuses on when and how to eat, which teaches participants a sustainable way to lose weight and keep it off long-term. The entire program is delivered online, which makes the program turnkey for employers and convenient for employees to participate in on their own time.