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Effectiveness of weight loss programs

So I was listening to some nutrition lectures from Berkeley that can be downloaded as podcasts and in one of them guest lecturer Dr Kater talks about "Health at Every Size". It was interesting because she highlighted how ineffective weight loss programs tend to be -

50% of people who start a diet drop out, 25% will actually lose weight and only 5% will have maintained the weight loss after 5 years. What is more startling is that the lost weight on average is only 7lb.

It gets worse. Serials dieters are losing weight but are then putting it back on. Weight cycling puts the body through huge amounts of stress and often leads to lower self esteem. The average dieters will have tried it twenty time and will almost always regain more than before. The advice is try, try then give up.

But this does not mean there no hope. Kater goes to great lengths to explain that it's not the fact that a person is fat that is the risk factor for increased rates of mortality, but lack of fitness. You can be large but if you're metabolically fit then you stand to live longer than an unfit thin person. I guess it's the $33bn weight loss industry and its heavy marketing that is stopping this message from going through. It's possible to try and be fit through more novel ways like this one!

Tags: diet, food