Maintenance of Diet and Activity Behaviors and Weight Loss After Intensive Lifestyle Intervention Scoping Review Protocol

Abstract

Rationale: Although intensive lifestyle interventions tend to be successful at initiating weight loss, maintaining weight loss after withdrawal of intervention is more challenging. Also, it is unclear to what degree behavioral changes in dietary intake and physical activity that were made during weight loss initiation persist after treatment discontinuation and account for the observed variability in weight loss maintenance. A primary barrier to optimizing lifestyle interventions for long-term sustained improvement is the current lack of a coherent theoretical and methodological foundation for operationalizing maintenance. Indeed, there is variability in how researchers define, measure, and evaluate maintenance of both weight regulatory behaviors and weight loss following intervention. This variability in operationalizing maintenance could have significant implications for designing and optimizing interventions to achieve long-term maintenance. A synthesis of the available evidence on post-intervention behavioral weight loss maintenance is needed to lay a foundation that future researchers can use to appropriately design and implement interventions that produce meaningful, sustained healthful improvements in weight.

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