Weight and Healthcare

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I was just tagged into a Facebook conversation where someone was claiming that the findings of the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) “prove that the claim that weight loss fails about 95% of the time is absolutely false,” and “show how to lose weight and keep it off”. I’ve been hearing this for a lot of years, and I was sad to find that it’s still going around, so let’s take a closer look at the NWCR and their findings.

They call themselves “the largest prospective investigation of long-term successful weight loss maintenance” so let’s examine that: In order to be a “success” by the NWCR’s definition, one must lose 30 pounds (which they consider a “significant amount of weight” regardless of the starting weight of the participant) and maintain the weight loss for one year. It’s worth noting that most people gain their weight back in years 2-5, so, following in the footsteps of many studies funded by the diet industry, the NWCR has given themselves a four-year efficacy cushion for initial registration. Also, all of the information is self-reported.

So, how many “successes” do they have? They started in 1994 and currently, their home page says they are following “over 10,000 individuals.” (Interestingly, I originally wrote about this in December of 2012 and at that time they were following… “over 10,000 individuals.”) So after 28 years they have “over 10,000” successes (and, remember, they are “the largest prospective investigation of long-term successful weight loss maintenance.”)

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