Why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off? For a moment, several years ago, it looked like we had an answer. In May 2016, The New York Tim

Unexpected Clues Emerge About Why Diets Fail

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2022-07-06 19:00:10

Why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off? For a moment, several years ago, it looked like we had an answer. In May 2016, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the findings from a study out of the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases: fourteen reality show contestants had been tracked for half a dozen years after appearing on the program The Biggest Loser. Through dieting and very intensive exercise, each had lost at least 50 pounds during their time on the television series—and a couple had shed more than 200—but the follow-up study found they’d regained about two-thirds of what they’d lost, on average. A handful ended up even heavier than when they first appeared on the television program.

This weight rebound came as no surprise. The tendency of dieters’ bodies to creep back toward prior weights has been among the most reliable and replicable results in the study of weight loss interventions. Research suggests that roughly 80%of people who shed a significant portion of their body fat will not maintain that degree of weight loss for 12 months; and, according to one meta-analysis of intervention studies, dieters regain, on average, more than half of what they lose within two years. Meanwhile, follow-up care that is meant to stave off this backsliding via behavioral or lifestyle interventions appears to be effective only at the margins: across several dozen randomized trials, the benefits of these programs—in terms of minimizing regain—were pretty small at two years, and undetectable thereafter. In short, we’ve known for quite some time that while it’s hard to lose weight, it’s even harder to keep it off.

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