In a reply on a post I made about diets not working, someone shared an article about a study that seemed to suggest that anyone can lose weight. The study is here: Dietary intervention and BMI reduction in individuals at the extremes of genetic predisposition to higher BMI: a randomized controlled trial
I thought I'd share my process when presented with apparent "proof" that weight loss is possible (and can be maintained long term). I am not an expert, and it's been twenty years since I took a statistics class, so I honestly don't remember how to read studies that well. But there's a few things that anybody can do.
First, I went to the study itself. What an article has to say about a study is usually pretty worthless. Whoever wrote the article wants to promise a lot more than the study actually does.
Second, I look at a few things: how long after losing weight did the study follow up with participants? How many participants were in the study? How much weight did they lose? What do the people conducting the study actually conclude (as opposed to what the article promises).
In this case, the study only followed participants for six months. There were 223 participants. If I'm reading it correctly (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), they lost an average of 1.51 kg, about 3 lbs.
We do know that short term weight loss is possible. It happens all the time! So this study is not very helpful in the conversation about whether diets work. To be fair, the study wasn't trying to answer that question. The study's purpose was to compare people who may be genetically prone to higher BMIs against people who were not. The text of the abstract says that the size of the study is not enough to make any assumptions about what happens to the general population.
In the anti-diet world, when we say that diets don't work, what we mean is that dieting does not result in long-term, significant weight loss. There have been a great number of studies that prove this out. Unfortunately, a lot of them are behind paywalls, but other folks have done the work of reading them and explaining them, like this post here. I've reblogged a lot of lists of books that can get anyone started on learning this information too, but I didn't tag them great (they're under the fat lib tag, but I'll have to go add the books tag to them all).
The only way to get long term, significant weight loss is to maintain a low calorie diet forever. And that is an eating disorder. If you don't start eating more and gain the weight back, then you will die. That's the only "diet" that works.
I was asked what I'm "gaining" by telling people that diets don't work. What I hope I'm gaining is people who live. People who nourish themselves, who respect their body's needs, who get the opportunity to create more memories with their loved ones. Dieting kills people. And when it doesn't kill them, it saps the joy out of their lives.
Please, take care of yourselves.
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