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Press Release: US Armed Forces Family Health Plan Enlists Careguide
January 14, 2005

Adult weight management is above all a psychological challenge. The marching route to achieve and sustain a
lean body leads through a minefield of subtle traps and brutal explosions: the overweight adult suffers
daily an all-out attack on the psyche. By the time a person turns for help, even the words "weight management"
and "healthy body" subvert success by their associations with deprivation, discomfort, embarrassment and failure.
That's why the Careguide program,
"Getting Down to the Real Me," is based on extensive psychological
research and uses telephone counselors with advanced training in behavioral health. Careguide has identified
major psychological obstacles other programs have missed and has applied breakthrough techniques to overcome them.
- Offers convincing science that an overweight adult cannot ever "accept themselves" that way.
- Uses counseling techniques developed at Harvard University to quickly draw out an enrollee's most
inspiring motivations and most devastating barriers to success.
- Presents the results of first-hand research identifying the most common excuses for
lapses in discipline and applies counseling techniques developed with professionals from
Illinois state centers for mental health to "Bash Excuses."
- Incorporates the most rigorous standards of health literacy in both text and graphics, to ensure
communicative effectiveness.
- Resolves conflicting diet recommendations and engages enrollees in a plan consistent with all
three major authorities: Mayo Clinic, Harvard University and USDA food pyramids.
- Never suggests any aspect of the program is "easy"Ņa major failing of other approaches:
- Promising ease is a patent lie that subverts engaging enrollees in the first place.
- Expecting ease causes enrollees to abandon a program when they find it is in fact hard.
- To say having a trim body is "easy" strips the goal of joy in hard-won success.
Psychiatrists endorse the unique approach of Careguide. The materials "not only have a unique capacity
to deliver a message but add a level of emotional content which in my opinion assists in the longer term
retention of the message. I think this looks very good. All of the pieces make sense to me. Thank you
for allowing me the opportunity to review this."
Samuel Toney, MD. Tampa, Florida.
Our call center partner finds their increased role "exciting. It's fascinating...to have material
that is so effective that it requires special preparedness on the part of the clinical coach."
Michael Yuhas, President, Health Integrated, Inc.
# # #
Contact
Shirley Grey, MSN EVP
sgrey@communicationscience.com
847-850-7500
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