Weight loss is about more than numbers on a scale; it’s about full-body wellness impacting your musculoskeletal, mental, and physical health.
That’s why we take all measures possible to help you lose weight at Iowa Wellness Center. This includes lifestyle management, ongoing support, and even medications like tirzepatide or semaglutide.
Near Cedar Rapids, our weight loss center has helped numerous patients boost their health and well-being.
To learn more about our approach to weight loss, keep reading.
Medications
Medications like semaglutide and tirzepatide have helped thousands of people sustainably lose weight. With so much success, there are also a lot of misunderstandings, so we want to take a moment to clear those up.
Semaglutide and tirzepatide are not “quick-fix solutions” or “miracle drugs.”
They are, however, effective weight loss injectables that mimic your body’s natural glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) hormone, which plays several roles in your bodily processes and health, including the following.
Appetite Suppression
As you eat, your small intestine releases the GLP-1 hormone, signaling to your brain that you’re full and should stop eating. By imitating this function, medications like semaglutide and tirzepatide “trick” your brain into thinking you’re satisfied with smaller meal portions, which helps you maintain a calorie deficit (burning more calories than you consume) to lose weight.
Insulin Production
Before semaglutide was popular for weight loss, it was used to help patients with type 2 diabetes manage their insulin production. This keeps your blood sugar levels stable and allows your body to use the food you eat for energy, rather than storing it as fat. Therefore, medications like tirzepatide and semaglutide near Cedar Rapids can both help treat and prevent type 2 diabetes.
Slowed Digestion
GLP-1 medications like semaglutide and tirzepatide slow the movement of food through your stomach and small intestine. This keeps you feeling full longer, decreasing the urge to snack between meals.
Semaglutide vs. Tirzepatide
While both medications work similarly, tirzepatide also mimics another hormone in your body called the gastric-inhibitory polypeptide (GIP), which further stabilizes your blood sugar and reduces hunger.
Depending on your medical history, our team determines which medication is better for you.
Nutritional Guidance
All patients will receive nutritional guidance and recommended lifestyle adjustments—whether or not they are prescribed GLP-1 medications like semaglutide near Cedar Rapids.
This service is tailored to you and your unique journey to weight loss. Unlike crash diets, we don’t focus on restricting what you eat. Instead, we teach you how to choose the right foods to give you energy, satiate your hunger, and even aid your body in recovering from physical activity.
This includes knowledge of the 3 main macronutrients: proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
Proteins
Proteins are made up of amino acids; they are known as “building blocks” that can give you energy and repair your muscles and bones. We typically suggest animal products such as eggs, dairy, and chicken because they are the simplest way to obtain protein. However, if you’re vegan or vegetarian, you can also find this nutrient in legumes (like beans), seeds, nuts, and soy products like tofu.
Carbohydrates
Most weight loss methods tell you to cut this food out entirely—but not us. Carbohydrates give you energy that can fuel your exercises and help you continue your day. The problem is that there are a lot of carbs out there, and we typically grab simple carbohydrates that can spike blood sugar and digest quicker than complex carbohydrates.
To put it simply, when following a calorie deficit—whether with the help of medications like semaglutide near Cedar Rapids or not—it’s best to choose whole-grain bread and rice over white, and to remember to include fruits and vegetables in your diet.
Fats
Just the name alone can help you guess why people often want to restrict or even entirely avoid this food group. Fats get a bad reputation—because too much fat can spike your blood sugar and convert to body fat. But getting a healthy amount of fat, and from the right sources, is vital to life and your bodily processes.
You can find fats in olive oil, avocados, and nuts like almonds or peanuts. Our team will help you determine how much of this food group you should incorporate into your diet and which sources to choose from.
Gut Health Kit
We include a gut health kit as part of our weight loss program and in addition to medications like tirzepatide or semaglutide near Cedar Rapids. Your gut is a microbiome that contains about 200 different types of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. That may sound scary—aren’t we usually trying to avoid these specific microorganisms?
Usually yes, but in some cases, like with our gut health, some of these aids in breaking down food into nutrients that help our body.
With our nutritional guidance, we help make sure you are eating the right foods to support a diverse and healthy gut microbiome. These include high-fiber foods like vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and nuts.
Exercise Recommendations
Weight loss often doesn’t simply mean fat loss—you may also lose weight from decreases in muscle mass and bone density. This is a common side effect of any form of weight loss, because when you’re following a calorie deficit, your muscles and bones aren’t getting the same amount of nutrients as they used to. A proper diet can help—especially one high in protein.
However, we all know that the best way to build muscle is through a combination of aerobic and resistance-based exercises, which also helps you burn more calories.
Importance of Aerobics
To slim down, you’ve got to get your heart rate up, and the best way to do that is with aerobic exercises like walking, cycling, and swimming. When you first start your weight loss journey, whether with semaglutide near Cedar Rapids or not, we teach you the importance of starting slow and working your way up, so you don’t over-exhaust yourself and eventually burn out.
Going at your own pace, walking will gradually intensify and soon turn to jogging and then running. You’ll swim longer and harder, and cycle faster.
Strength Training
After you’ve built up endurance, we teach you strength training exercises like squats, deadlifts, and resistance training—all of which can combat muscle loss and promote lean muscle mass instead, giving you a toned appearance.
Emsculpt NEO Body Sculpting
A service that we offer at Iowa Wellness Center that aids you in your weight loss journey is Emsculpt NEO. This body contouring device can help you reduce fat and build muscle in the treatment area.
But let’s get one thing straight: Emsculpt NEO is not a substitute for exercise or other weight loss techniques.
This treatment helps you lose that last bit of stubborn fat in areas like your thighs, arms, and stomach, while building lean muscle as well. It employs 2 technologies: radiofrequency (RF) energy and high-intensity focused electromagnetic (HIFEM) energy.
RF energy heats and permanently destroys stubborn fat cells that remain even with medications like tirzepatide and semaglutide near Cedar Rapids. Over time, your body flushes these fat cells from your body.
At the same time, HIFEM energy induces up to 20,000 muscle contractions in 30 minutes—painlessly. Not only does this noninvasive treatment give you a more toned and defined contour, it also provides more muscle strength in the treatment area, giving you functional benefits as well. In fact, this treatment can relieve back pain, help with muscle rehabilitation, and more.
Complementary Treatments for Weight Loss
We provide a range of other treatments to aid your weight loss journey. These include the following.
Chiropractic Care
Carrying excess weight strains your back, knees, and even your neck, causing you pain and inflammation from the stress on these joints. We share a roof with Family & Sport Chiropractic, who can offer you relief from this pain and improve your mobility and endurance. These services include specialized massages, spinal alignments, and even physical therapy.
IV Therapy
We’ve talked about the importance of macronutrients, but let’s not forget about micronutrients—the vitamins and minerals that aid in the metabolic process of converting macronutrients to energy. IV therapy delivers an infusion of micronutrients directly to your bloodstream so your body can use them quickly and at maximum absorption. This helps you stay hydrated, energetic, and healthy throughout your weight loss journey.
Infrared Sauna
Our infrared sauna doesn’t heat the surrounding air. Instead, it delivers heat directly to your body, penetrating deeper tissues to aid your body in detoxification—flushing out impurities and toxins. From improving heart health to enhancing sleep and soothing sore muscles, the infrared sauna can help you feel better and provide you with a sense of calm and relaxation, supporting a healthier overall lifestyle during your weight loss efforts.
See Real Results With Our Team
Weight loss is a journey, and one that you shouldn’t go on alone. With help from our team at Iowa Wellness Center, you will not only see real results, but you’ll feel them as well. We help you sustainably lose weight and keep it off with diet, exercise, and medications like semaglutide near Cedar Rapids.
To get started, you can try our treatment planner tool or request a consultation.
