FOCUS ON HEALTH:Working on weight loss

Californians — especially Southern Californians — are known to be a pretty health-conscious lot. This is a good thing, right?

Keith McGuinness, chief executive of Costa Mesa-based Calorie King, contends that this concern for health and weight is good and bad. On the one hand, McGuinness praised Southern Californians for our willingness to try the latest and greatest diet programs and health services on the market.

“Californians will try a lot of new things and change their behaviors a lot, so in some ways [California is] a great ground to try out new ideas.”

But, he said, there is a downside.

“Anyone who tries new programs and new diets all the time actually gets in the habit of constantly changing their behavior. They never settle into a reliable weight-loss routine,” McGuinness said.

This paves the way for more, similar diets and programs, and a cycle starts that doesn’t allow people to achieve their weight-loss goals.

This is where McGuinness thinks his program has a distinct advantage: Calorie King Complete Weight Management System, which has been available to businesses for about four months, is intended to run long enough for dieters to change their thinking and learn lasting, healthy eating habits.

CalorieKing has existed since the 1970s, when it was created by dietitian Allan Borushek in Perth, Australia. In 1988 the company expanded to the United States, setting up headquarters on 17th Street in Costa Mesa.

The complete system features a subscription to www.calorieking.com, enrollment in Calorie King University (a 13-week online program on various issues about such health topics as fitness and nutrition) and other online resources.

The system, which is trying hard to attract more users, is especially appealing for employers, who get to pay reduced health insurance costs as long as they can show that their employees are losing weight.

It’s an effort to combat obesity and diabetes, and the increasing number of work days each year that are lost to complications from such diseases.

It was this concern for her employees’ health that got Amie Horan, a marketing communications manager at American Health Holding Company in Ohio, interested in using Calorie King’s services.

“The healthcare employee population is actually not the healthiest group of people. The weight issue and nutrition issue, especially, are big. We value our employees as assets, so we want to give them the tools to make them feel better about themselves,” she said.

She emphasized that the mostly online program is simple for employees to use and allows them to easily track their own progress, recording such information as how many calories they eat in a day. It also lets Horan track the progress of the group as a whole, looking at such categories as weight and body mass index.

Horan says that 28 of her employees are already using the program, and as a group, they’ve lost 28 1/2 pounds in a month. To her, this is all the reason to stick with Calorie King.

She admits that “you can’t record how many calories you eat your whole life.” But she feels that Calorie King is different.

“I think the tools at the university will help people develop lifelong habits. It gives you the knowledge you need to make wise decisions.”