Effectiveness of Brief Counseling for Weight Management

There is a growing demand for effective obesity treatments that don't require much time to implement especially in a primary health-care setting where time is especially limited. Brief interventions that might provide benefits similar to those produced by more time-intensive and costly lifestyle interventions would be very useful. There is also increasing interest in the efficacy of primary drug therapies for obesity. The purpose of this 12-month study, and 24-month follow-up, is to examine the efficacy of a brief behavioral counseling intervention alone or in combination with a drug already approved for the long-term management of obesity (orlisat)and compare both interventions to a drug alone condition.