“This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. Still, they push the same ineffective treatments, insisting they’ll make you not just thinner but healthier.
In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.”
Diets do not work because they are temporary. Permanent lifestyle changes have a 100% success rate, however.
There is no “lifestyle change” method of weight loss which has been shown to reliably make obese people non-obese over the long term. And by “shown,” I mean someone documented it in a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal.
If I’m mistaken, then please show me my mistake with a citation to a peer-reviewed paper.
Today’s debunk- The link above goes to the The National Weight Control Registry.
Let’s take a look at what this registry considers “long term”.
One year.
Back when I was still engaged in destroying my body with dieting and weight cycling, I lost more than 30 pounds and kept it off for more than a year.
It still came back, plus some.
When we say that long term weight loss does not appear to be possible in most people, we mean 5 years or 10 years or more.
One year?
I believe this is what The Wire referred to as “juking the stats”.
Additionally, we see from their “Join the Registry” page, that zero attempt is made to verify self-reported information. B/c all the names are confidential, there is no way for anyone else to check this information.
And despite 30 minutes of intense googling, I can’t find out who is funding this thing.
Doesn’t look like good science-ing to me.
Such self-reported results, besides being unverified, cannot be used for scientific purposes because, no matter how many report success, the data is useless if we do not know what percentage of those attempting diet they are.
I am a mathematician by profession and it saddens me that ignorance about the basics of statistics and probability leads too many people (including some medical professionals) to ill-informed choices.
It’s like making a national registry of Powerball jackpot winners and saying that everybody can win the Powerball if you just do all the things Powerball winners do.
^^^ this is a really perfect analogy.
Even if you were to take the registry seriously it has anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 participants at any time. All of the studies I looked at still show a minimal amount of people making it to 5 years of keeping off the required 30 lbs to be part of the registry. Anywhere from 7-15% since they make it very hard for the general public to see their overall sample size. Those that make it are 95% white, are around 45+ years old and 25% or more have a graduate degree or higher. So the people that are able to maintain that level of minimal weight loss have a significant amount of social advantage and power compared to society as a whole.
Thus, even if you are willing to ignore this data is self reported it isn’t generalizable to the population as a whole.
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