Nope and nope.
SLIM TLC® has two meanings. Most importantly, it represents becoming SLIM and healthy through “TLCs” (Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes – see below). For those who desire a prescription medicine to boost their efforts, SLIM is also an acronym for the optional use of a Shortest-term, Lowest effective & tolerated Intervention with Medicine – while we are helping you make the necessary TLCs.
Even though some of the medicines we prescribe may be FDA-approved for long-term use, our ever-present goal is to help you learn the necessary long-term Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes that will help you wean down or off the medicine. We believe that all legitimate (if applicable) health care providers should have the ultimate goal of putting themselves out of business – i.e., to make our patients learn how to take care of themselves without our ongoing help. This includes weight loss. When you add SLIM TLC® (which significantly increases the likelihood of effective long-term lifestyle changes) to the initial boost with medicine, it is highly likely that you will find you can do it on your own, and it won't be long before you decide it's time to try (especially when you see how much money you can save in medication and program costs by switching to the SLIM TLC® without Meds option!).
This medicine is a doctor-prescribed modality that is intervening on your behalf only to assist you, hopefully only temporarily, in the weight loss and health-seeking process. Again, the goal is to be able to have long-term success on your own.
Without making permanent lifestyle changes, any weight loss effort, including the use of medicine, results only in temporary weight loss. Long-term lifestyle changes, primarily following SLIM TLC®'s "Free Food? Whatever!" eating strategy and staying as active as possible, are the keys to long-term health. These lifestyle changes and the long-term weight loss they provide, along with not smoking, will prevent most cases of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and likely Alzheimer's (!), which are responsible for the grand majority of deaths, along with a host of other diseases and ailments. As such, they will likely save both your life and our health care system.
If permanent lifestyle changes were easy, we’d all be slim. However, once you learn the skills and apply the tools found in SLIM TLC® (a process that seems a little intense only at first), you will quickly realize that they are much simpler than most programs (= high chance they will be maintained for life!). And this may be facilitated at the beginning by using medicine. SLIM TLC® encourages realistic, maintainable changes in your eating and exercise habits, founded on medically sound principles, along with significant recent advances in the field of nutrition science. Participants implement our revolutionary eating strategy called "Free Food? Whatever!," which does not prohibit any foods you enjoy (it just makes you want to choose healthier fare), and follow a livable, rational exercise regimen. Livable changes are made as quickly as you feel comfortable, and lead to long-term weight loss success.
They are tracked through logs or our groundbreaking goal-setting and tracking system called the “SLIM TLC® Map,” which is submitted to us monthly.