When Temple Clinic won the award for health, fitness and wellbeing at the recent Virtual Society Awards 2020, the team was utterly delighted, yet slightly surprised.
First set up to provide aesthetic treatments (such as botox and dermal fillers), Temple’s original focus was very much on anti-ageing and beautification, rather than health and fitness.
The clinic still offers these treatments – and to a very high standard, having collected many awards for the team’s expertise – but in recent years it has diversified into services for skin and weight loss programmes.
During this diversification, the clinic has progressively adopted a holistic, lifestyle medicine approach to every service it provides.
And it is sure to be all of this recent effort which helped bag them the health, fitness and wellbeing award.
All changes were given an added impetus recently when the clinic’s Medical Director, Dr Sam Robson, successfully qualified as a Lifestyle Medicine Physician, gaining a diploma from the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine.
Temple Vie weight loss programme
In the health and wellbeing area, the clinic’s flagship offering is the Temple Vie weight loss and lifestyle management programme.
As a starting point, they adopted the view that any successful programme in this area should comprise a rapid, safe, medically supervised weight loss phase; but this was indeed the starting point.
The weight loss needed to be enduring and, without patients changing both their original diet and lifestyle, this outcome would be unlikely.
Thus, an emphasis is put on patients acquiring long term habits of enjoyable physical activity.
Many people fail to maintain weight loss through a lack of knowledge about what they should eat, so nutritional education is also an important element of the clinic’s plan.
People who are overweight often have problems with emotional eating and/or binge eating, which requires support, understanding and sometimes more focused psychological interventions.
The Temple Vie programme includes monthly medical assessments and weekly sessions during which skilled therapists provide effective body contouring treatments. These treatments help to break down stubborn fat and tighten loose skin, but the sessions also provide crucial opportunities to support, encourage and advise.
The clinic welcomed its first Temple Vie patients early in 2019 and, during the lockdown hiatus, were able to audit the progress of its first 60 patients. This paper was published in an international peer reviewed journal, Obesity Medicine, and confirms that during the first 12 weeks of Temple Vie, patients lost an average of two stone while also lowering their blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Temple aim to keep seeing patients regularly for at least two years after their weight loss. The thought being, if they can keep the weight off for this length of time, the outlook for sustained weight loss is much more positive.
Skincare
The other area of Temple’s practice which has been heavily influenced by holistic lifestyle approaches is problem skin.
This resulted in both Dr Sam and Cherelle Welsh, the clinic’s leading skincare therapist, gaining accreditation by the Acne and Rosacea Association UK (ARAUK) last year.
This qualification not only indicates the skill of Sam and Cherelle, but also means that pharmacists can refer a person with problem skin directly to Temple Clinic.
Patients may be surprised when they are asked about their diet, sleep, stress levels and exercise routines when attending the clinic for issue with their skin, but these factors are often of huge relevance.
At the clinic, lifestyle advice goes hand-in-hand with advice on the most effective skincare products and treatments and, despite the pandemic, its skincare services have flourished significantly – a success attributed to the collaborative working and expertise of the current streamlined team at Temple.
The other services of aesthetic treatments and Bio-identical Hormone Replacement Therapy offered by Temple are also state-of-the-art. For more mature patients, these services are very much anti-ageing procedures, helping people to feel better about themselves, both physically and psychologically.
Indeed, every element of every programme at Temple Clinic is geared towards making clients feel happy and healthy within themselves. Find out more about what they can do for you here.