After meeting with Mary Verity, owner of Comprehensive Medical Weight Loss, it’s easy to see why her business has experienced radical success in just a few years.
In 2012, Mary was working as a marketing manager for a national diagnostics laboratory. She worked with physicians on how to take the test results, interpret them, and then treat their respective patients. It was during this time that she met Dr. Steven Foley, owner of Comprehensive Womens Care of Colorado Springs. Dr. Foley loved how his patients drastically improved their health and well-being through the testing and application methodology. As a result, Dr. Foley and Mary partnered together and Comprehensive Medical Weight Loss was born in 2012.
The center primarily utilizes laboratory testing and extensive patient health and family history to medically identify why a patient can’t lose weight and/or continues to gain weight. Many people reduce weight gain to simply eating too much and not exercising enough. However, Mary and her team believe there are underlying physiological and medical issues that must be treated first in order to have long-term success with a diet and exercise program.
With a nurse practitioner and physician on the patient’s care team, the medical problems are treated first before beginning the program. Next, a nutritional counselor works with the patient to integrate a low carb, high protein diet into their lifestyle. There are no prepackaged meals (think Nutrisystem) because Comprehensive Medical Weight Loss wants to ensure each patient’s’ long term success. They believe in real, quality food and strategize with people on how to eat based on their individual schedules. Mary and her team work with a lot of shift workers and together, they come up with creative ways to pair food with lifestyle.
When the center first opened, Mary’s biggest challenge was having to start from the ground up. They grew from 0 patients to now over 2,000 in just 4 years. Initially, because their location was off the beaten path, they relied on word of mouth advertising. Each employee also went through the program and many are now featured in TV or website testimonials. It builds great confidence in the mind of a potential patient to see employees having gone through the program and now living happy, healthy lifestyles.
In 2013, as they were opening a second location in Denver, Mary was “head zookeeper and chief bottle washer”. As a small business owner, she wore all the hats and experienced little sleep, but the success of her patients and proven concepts of the program kept her going.
However, sharing Dr.Foley’s frustrations with the mainstream medical community’s view on weight gain, Mary says it’s incredibly frustrating to see her patient’s being told by their physicians to just “push back from the table”. Under the surface, there is so often a hormone/thyroid imbalance, vitamin deficiency, insulin resistance (pre-diabetic condition), or a host of other potential problems that must first be medically treated. As 2017 is upon us, Mary would like to see less patients receive faulty information from their primary care physicians only to end up back in the same struggle again.
