For the last 50 years every study that has been conducted regarding long term weight loss has shown that weight loss fails about 95% of the time. Yet we are constantly told by the media, the government, our doctors etc. that anybody who tries hard enough can lose weight and keep it off. Plenty of studies have shown that the body has a number of physiological reactions to weight loss that are designed to regain weight and then retain that weight. Yet we are told that those who regain their weight have just “gone back to their old habits.”
So a person begins one of a thousand intentional weight loss programs (also known as a “lifestyle change”). They lose weight at first, then between 2 and 5 years after the loss they gain back all of the weight plus more, despite diligently maintaining their diet behaviors (aka “lifestyle change”). They report these happenings to their doctor only to be be told that they must not have been properly counting calories, they must have overestimated their movement. Their experience, they will be told, could not possibly have happened. Or they tell their doctor that they just couldn’t mentally and physically continue their “lifestyle change” and are told again that they just weren’t trying hard enough.
All this despite the fact that their experience is exactly what the research tells us to expect. When hundreds of thousands of credible first person accounts match up with what research has found, typically that’s a good time to jump out of your bathtub and run around naked yelling “Eureka, I’ve found it.”
So how does this happen? Those who are perpetuating this “weight loss works’ culture are doing a couple of things frighteningly well.
First, they are doing a great job of obfuscating the evidence. Remember when a study found that Weight Watchers participants lost around about 10 pounds in six months and kept off half of that for two years (giving them a 3 year efficacy buffer but who’s counting) and Karren Miller-Kovach, chief scientific officer of Weight Watchers International at the time said: “It’s nice to see this validation of what we’ve been doing.” Five pounds in two years. Five pounds in two years. Five freaking pounds in two freaking years?!?!?!?!?!. But every time I say something about Weight Watchers people tell me how well it works (often, defying all logic, telling me that they’ve “done Weight Watchers 6 times and it worked every time“.)
Or the National Weight Control registry claiming to prove that weight loss works when the truth is that they would need 32,990,000 more success stories just to show a 5% success rate for dieting over the time they’ve been collecting data. They’ve only managed to gather about 10,000 success stories since 1994, so they just moved the goal post and claimed victory at the fact that their numbers indicate that dieting works .009% of the time which means that if you walk to your Weight Watchers meeting in the rain you are three times more likely to die from a lightning strike than lose weight long term.
The second thing that they do alarmingly well is to discredit what are actually completely credible first person accounts of dieting failure. Hundreds of thousands of people have diet failures every year. Some of them have been convinced that they suddenly lost the ability to accurately maintain their diet behaviors – that they must be doing something wrong if they are regaining weight. Some who sure of our stories and so are excoriated and discredited as “trying to justify our fatness” (as if we need justification to exist in our bodies.)
But the diet industry and its cronies do it with shocking success. Hundreds of thousands of people saying “I had the exact experience that research said was most likely” and somehow the diet industry, the government, the medical establishment are able to discredit all of us in the eyes of the greater culture.
This is exactly the same as if women who took thalidomide were telling their doctors “Fifty years of studies say that thalidomide causes birth defects. I took thalidomide and my baby has birth defects” and the doctors said “Nonsense, you just didn’t try hard enough to have a baby without birth defects, see – this woman took thalidomide and her baby is fine, you’re just a bad mother”and everyone believed them and shamed and stigmatized them.
This is all by way of saying that if you’ve tried dieting and ended up regaining all of your weight, or all of your weight plus more, then welcome to The 95% Club, we don’t have jackets yet but we’re working on it. You have the right to claim and own the fact that you are indeed a credible witness to your experience, and you can refuse to allow someone else to substitute their fabricated (and highly lucrative) experiences for your actual ones.
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I do HAES and SA activism, speaking and writing full time, and I don’t believe in putting corporate ads on my blog and making my readers a commodity. So if you find value in my work, want to support it, and you can afford it, you can become a member (you get extra stuff, discounts, and you’re always the first to know about things) or a you can support my work with a one-time contribution. The regular e-mail blog subscription (available at the top right hand side of this page) is still completely free. If you’re curious about this policy, you might want to check out this post. Thanks for reading! ~Ragen
There is one sure-fire way to lose weight, and I guarantee it for anyone. Three weeks ago I was up visiting family on a reunion/sight-seeing trip, and a GI bug got a hold of me. For three days, I was laid flat with all the fun a GI bug brings and could manage maybe a handful of oyster crackers and some Ginger Ale twice a day. When I finally was able to stand up for more than 20 minutes without falling over, my dad remarked happily, “You look fantastic! Lost a lot of weight, I see!”
I replied, “Dad, I’ve been puking my guts out and have barely eaten in three days.”
“Hey,” he said in a fatherly, knowing way, “whatever works! Keep it up!”
Starvation works wonders! *headwall* /sarcasm
I am so sorry for this experience! But I had to laugh hysterically because it has happened to me! ugh!
It reminds me of an article/letter I read in a magazine years ago (BBW, anyone remember this?). A man wrote in about his sick and dying wife being complimented on finally losing weight. Because she was sick and dying! He was disgusted with it all.
It still doesn’t work for everyone, Yorkie. I have a friend who suffered from dysentery for a week and didn’t lose an ounce!
All these years later, though, she’s still trying diet after diet sure that if she just finds the right one and sticks with it, she’ll be the size four she never was in her entire life.
In fact, the only time I can think of that she’s actually lost weight was during chemotherapy for breast cancer. She lost three pounds and was really annoyed that the doctor told her that was a bad thing.
Atkins, WW, meal supplement shakes, French Women Don’t Get Fat, this diet, that diet… her body stays roughly the same size and configuration. It certainly has for the entire thirty-two years I’ve known her, and yet the light bulb still won’t go on.
It still doesn’t work for everyone, Yorkie. I have a friend who suffered from dysentery for a week and didn’t lose an ounce!
Note: Graphic talk of bodily functions.
So true. I have Crohn’s, and during a flare up, I can have a week or two where I poop copiously, and where my food intake is readily identifiable by looking at my poop output. That is, a lot of my food is going straight through me and being digested poorly if at all. (During these times, I’m also naturally prone to eat less because diarrhea is not my idea of a good time.) I certainly experience plenty of energy loss, but weight? Never.
It is amazing to me how you can so consistently be correct. We need to clone you and have your voice of reason everywhere. Thanks.
BTW, this is the comment I’d muddy up your blog with everyday, but refrain… Don’t want others to know that I love your mind the best. Thanks.
Thank you! And don’t worry, it will be our little secret,
~Ragen
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I don’t know, it’s very easy to see why this happens for me. Accepting the research and what it means for me personally–that I will never ever ever be thin, the thing that I’ve wanted the most in the world since I was 10–was incredibly difficult, in part because the experience objectively looks like the research describes, but subjectively it feels much different. It does feel like a loss of willpower.
I’m very, very good at losing on the order of 40 pounds. Most of the time, I keep it off for around a year and a half, when it comes creeping back on. My post-diet eating was usually “healthy” breakfast. “Healthy” lunch. I deserve a yummy snack in the afternoon, not a big deal. OMG IT’S EVENING I’M EATING ALL THE THINGS. Wake up in the morning and think “Whoa, that was weird. Oh well, it’s just one day, got that out of my system, back to healthy eating today!” Then repeat repeat repeat until I’m 20 pounds heavier than I was when I started the diet. Seems obvious when I look at the pattern with knowledge I have now what was going on, but when I was living it it really did feel like I was failing nearly every day and if I would just somehow summon enough willpower I could start losing weight again and be thin. It wasn’t until I read some books on the issue that I realized what felt to me like a huge loss of willpower and my fault was a very common experience, and likely due to my hormones like leptin and ghrelin ramping my appetite up to 11. But that isn’t an intuitive conclusion.
I did exactly that for years! To start with I would be really strict and lose up to 100 lb before daily “failure” set in, but in the end even the start of a diet was like that. It made it so easy to accept the narrative that I was greedy and weak-willed when actually none of the thin people I know have had the willpower to diligently starve and exercise away half their body weight even once!
And by “willpower” I don’t mean it’s a good thing to do. When a thin person does it, it’s a serious illness.
It’s so easy to blame your lapses in eating healthily on yourself. After all it’s you doing the eating right? Your weight-loss history sounds just like mine! Even after i gave up dieting, I was still really frustrated that I wasn’t always attracted to ‘healthy’ foods and that I was still capable of a good old-fashioned binge of an evening. The final piece of my disordered-eating-puzzle was solved by a new book called ‘How to eat less without trying to eat less’ by Sue Thomason. I promise I’m not on commission or anything! I think it’s only published in the UK at the moment but it is available as an e-book. Anyhow, it really blew my mind, as it goes into what’s going on subconsciously when you try to exert cognitive control over what you choose to eat. Formal diets such as a Weight-watchers plan, trying to eat ‘healthily’, or even just thinking that you need to lose weight are all diets to your subconscious according to Thomason, and your brain will respond in the way it has evolved to survive millions of years of famine: it will make you eat on auto-pilot, stocking up on fat reserves it thinks it is going to need. Anyhow, this is of course not the case for everyone, but I have to say I haven’t overeaten ONCE since I read it months and months ago, and the relief I feel for being free of anxiety around food is just amazing
That looks like a good book (I found linkage here: http://suethomason.com/index.php/my-books/ ) — it is ironic that even a book about disordered eating & how to STOP dieting has to be marketed with the words “EAT LESS” taking up 1/3 of the front cover, but it sounds (from reading the first few pages) like she really does get it.
Yeah, as I say, it has definitely helped me finally conquer my last few food demons. The title is a bit crap (the whole book needs a good editing session; I think it’s privately published) but unlike a lot of other anti-dieting books, it doesn’t promise the golden goal of weight-loss. It is a good read for those who are a bit down the road with the intuitive eating thang and not those who are still full-on dieting. I met the author on an anti-dieting demonstration in London last January and she seriously knows her stuff. The government take her research seriously and she gave evidence in the recent Body Image Inquiry.
I am former Weight Watchers customer and I think it is possible that I have an irrational hatred for them. They weren’t selling me anything that I didn’t want to buy/believe, but I blame them for feeding my belief that I was at fault for my size even when I was doing what they told me and not losing the weight. Back when I was doing it, I thought it was weird when you dropped down a “decade” and were basically told “Congrats for the weight loss. Now you can eat less.” when I felt so hungry that I could have eaten my own arm.
Sigh, I hate them so much. I lost weight every time I went on their plan, but I found it absolutely impossible to maintain.
I’m so glad I found you and Big Liberty (through you). The scientific studies that the media and the weight loss industry have worked hard to suppress match my experience with weight loss almost to the tee. It is reassuring to know that there isn’t anything wrong with me. That this is how my body is supposed to work. Not that I’m not working hard enough or that I’m lazy.
I also have an irrational hatred of WW, though my history with them was much shorter. It was the public weigh in that led me to hate them so much and the lady shouted my weight across the room and set what I thought was an unattainably low goal weight for me and said if I wasn’t committed to reaching that weight then I wasn’t committed to being healthy. I don’t think I ever went more than two weeks to WW, but I think I hate them more than any other diet I ever went on. (This was like 20 years ago, so the hatred has really stuck.)
I know several women who still do WW and that’s fine, it’s their body, but they constantly talk about food, typically it’s about food they want to have or used to have and what they eat now instead, they seem so sad. They are all older than me and believe they know better than me and I stick to the underwear rule. In fact, I told them the underwear rule last week, and they were all surprised to learn that they are the boss of their own underpants, but they’re pretty sure they are also the boss of their husband’s underpants as well.
Sorry, got off on a side track, but the point is that I second your irrational hate of Weight Watchers and want their company to be exposed for the giant fraud they are.
I love these hate WW stories! lol My best was when I was trying to get pregnant and was taking clonapin. I gained weight and they lady weighing me asked me if it was really worth it to be pregnant. Saying something like that to someone who wants to be pregnant is pretty dumb!
I also knew WW wasn’t for me when another (later) time I sat in a meeting with the woman telling us how she counts points (do they even still do that?) and had for the previous gazillion years. I knew right then that I would never ever count points for the rest of my life. I have better things to do.
Now to share another company’s story. Long ago I knew a young, thin, gorgeous girl who was doing Jenny Craig. Every time she had to eat the food, she cried. Literally, at a BBQ where we’re all having fun and enjoying great food, she’s standing in a corner because she “has” to eat her JC meal. She was trying to lose less than 10 pounds…
I remember the last time I walked out of WW 20 years ago. The leader said just ask a thin person how they got thin and follow what they do. I thought it was so stupid I was speachless and walked out during the meeting and never went back. At the time, I was thinking I would rather ask a fat person how they lost weight and kept it off, not a thin person. Either way, it doesnt matter now, I know better.
Thanks for laying it out so well.
Would you care to take a crack at the common idea that it’s easier to keep from gaining weight than to lose it? I have no idea what people are using for evidence or logic on that one. Maybe it’s pure wishful thinking.
Oh, I’d like to hear about that one, too. My mother brings that one up constantly – or she used to, anyway – to explain to me why I should watch my weight while I was young so I wouldn’t end up old and fat like her (basically). Since there was a time then when I was an undergrad and eating pretty badly (doughnuts every day, lots of fast food) I still feel like maybe, yeah, I should have just taken better care of myself then and I never would have ended up this size =/
Well, sheesh, of course that’s true. If you start out with thin parents, and preferably thin grandparents, you’ll likely have a MUCH easier time keeping fat from happening to begin with than you would losing it if you run around eating a million cheeseburgers and an entire wedding cake or whatever it is us fatties are doing wrong.
But yeah, just seems to me like an extension of “this can’t possibly be a complicated system of genetics, class, availability, and habits, obviously, if you are thin or fat it’s ONLY HABITS AND NOTHING ELSE, and if you’re at all fat, well it’s because you weren’t doing things right to begin with, which would have been waaaaay easier than having to try and lose it now, I mean, look at so-and-so, she’s NEVER had a ‘weight problem,’ she must be doing it RIGHT the first time.”
*X-treme eyeroll*
I happened to glance at my very chubby toddler just after reading this. She was born chubby. Maybe I needed to diet when I was pregnant? I only gained 8 pounds, but I guess that was too much. (please forgive the sarcasm on that last point.)
It IS in the news. However, those articles that talk about the genetic link to fatness always kow tow to the diet industry by suggesting that people who are genetically fat should still try to lose weight… they just have to work harder to get there and keep it off.
It’s like reporting that the world is round… but people should still take plenty of rope and giant grappling hooks with them when they sail off into the horizon.
sorry, that reply went to the wrong place.
The sad thing is that many people really do put weight maintenance/loss over the health of their unborn child. Recently read statistics on how many babies in e.g. Japan are born with serious deficits and might develop physical symptoms only because their mother dieted all throught pregnance in order not to gain weight. I really wonder whether these mother will feed their babies (if these happen to be girls). Weeping for humanity over here in my corner.
In my book I devote a whole chapter to diets and said the same thing. The information is out there. The media doesnt want to tell us about it. And why, money, their sponsers. People say, fat people are in denial, well I believe thin people are in denial. My opinion, they may feel superior because of their thinness and if it were known they were born that way….well they wouldnt be superior in their own mind. Im not trying to start a war with thin people, I just wonder why this isnt in the news etc.
Yesterday after tai chi, I walked out with another woman who was raving about how great her latest physical went. Her numbers were good, the EKG she had was the same as 5 years earlier. Then she grabs the little roll around her waist and says, “but if I got rid of this it would all be better.” I pointed out she was living very healthily (I know she’s older than me and she’s super chipper and limber-appearing) and that was probably good enough. Then she went in to the extra weight tearing up her knees and a million other things about weight.
I’m standing there, almost 200 pounds overweight according to the height/weight scales, thinking about my sore knees…without a damn argument for her! It was disheartening to see this obviously happy/healthy woman berating herself. Add to that the feeling of judgment I took from her words–even though she in no way was outright about it…
There’s not actually research to back up the idea that losing weight automatically helps all joint problems. That idea is based on the “logic” that more weight = more stress, ignoring that more weight usually also = more muscle, which can actually help, especially with knees. I’ve had bad knees my entire life. It’s genetic. They first went out on me at age 14. Twenty years older and a hundred pounds heavier, they still bother me, but they’re actually in much better shape than they were then. They haven’t gone out on me in years, I haven’t been on crutches in ages, nothing, simply because I have more muscle in my legs, muscle that increased naturally as I got fatter, to haul the rest of me around (ok, and when I rode horses regularly, but I haven’t done that in a LONG time).
Yes, losing weight does seem to help some people’s joint problems. But when the weight won’t stay off, that’s not a good long-term solution, so we have to find others. There are excellent exercises for building up muscle to support bad knees and other joints, and supplements like glucosamine are a big help to (over the long term).
And weight loss, even in the short term, most decidedly does not help everyone with their joint problems. It’s not automatic.
Thanks for the information! I guess I’ll research this so I have a comeback for the next time something like this comes up.
With so many studies showing that dieting/calorie restriction is a major factor in _gaining_ weight in the long run, I’m left wondering if it’s dieting trends and businesses _like_ Weight Watchers starting first in the US in the early 60s that helped slingshot Americans first ahead of other countries into higher rates of obesity…and now other western nations in particular rapidly catching up.
Sweden, for example, where I live currently (am originally from the US) has certainly been getting taller on average (Where’s the war on the sudden outbreak of tall people?) but WW didn’t reach here until 1972, and then took awhile before becoming popular. (Currently, Swedes are extremely fat-phobic. Not so much fun for me.)
I’m just wildly speculating here, of course, but I’d be interested in seeing studies done on dieting popularity throughout the world, when they started in earnest, and the long-term effects they’ve had.
(And thanks again, Ragen, for your amazing blog! You help me to feel better about myself every day!)
Well, if a GI bug and dysentery and Crohn’s don’t make you lose weight, it’s your own daggone fault. Clearly you’re not handling your debilitating disease correctly *feral scream and gnashing of teeth*
Whomever said that bit about WWs up there…you’re spot on. I did it and lost nearly two stone and felt so happy, like I was becoming just a fabulous person, but you know what? I WAS STARVING. And I felt like a loser because my family would have these amazing pot pies, made fresh by the butcher in our village, and I’d be there with my bowl of veg soup, 1.5 tablespoons of parmesan cheese, 4 ounce chicken breast with soy sauce, and a cup of fat-free yogurt. GOOOOD times. Not at ALL resentful. Nuh-uh.
I notice that my former WW leader is no longer a leader and has gained back a lot of her lost weight…but still runs in marathons. This is the same woman who used to welcome each new member by showing a picture of herself as a large person, blown up and on a piece of foam board, and say with head hung low, “This is me. Before. I am never going to be that person again. If I can do it, you can too.”
“If I can do it, you can do it.” I hate that comment. I hear it all the time. What the hell does it mean anyway? My sarcasm!!! It is such a put down of the person saying it. Are they saying, “Im the weakest person it in the world, therefor, if I, a weak person, can do it……” Help me with a good comeback for that one. I go to a business meeting once a week and a lady there says that to our gourp everyweek when introducing herself.
- Yes, because we ARE the same person, after all.
- I can write with my left hand; I guess you should be able to, too.
- Ever hear that internet catchphrase “your mileage may vary”?
I quit smoking several years back, and if people ask, I’ll tell them about how I did it. I did it and it’s proof it can be done, by me, given a particular set of circumstances. I can also tell you about the times I quit and it didn’t work and I could also tell you about how any one factor could have been different I wouldn’t have been successful on the attempt I quit. I can also tell you how quitting smoking was million times easier for me than dieting was, and quitting smoking was HARD.
So while I think it’s good to hear other people’s experiences and perhaps to learn something from them, we are not carbon copies, biologically or in terms of life experiences and just because you did something does not mean that I can do something. So that lady can suck it.
I feel that way about television. If I as a fatty (with clearly NO willpower, you can tell just by looking at me) can give up tv for, oh, it’s been about 35 years now, why can’t other people manage to do so?
Surely there’s something you’ve managed to do (or not do) that few others can claim that you can mention?
Wow, no TV for 35 years! Absolutely extraordinary. I admire that!! We currently do not have TV in our house (we have the appliances but no TV programming…just didn’t want to do it to our kids, and it is a LOT of money for a LOT of crap telly).
The “If I can do it, anyone can” ranks right up there with “A child could do it”, “You can’t miss it,” and “It’s just that easy!” All of those make me want to smash things. It’s the 1+2=3 mentality which works well in science but not humans. Eat less, lose weight, be a fabulous person. Hold your life in abeyance until That Point Is Reached because you’re worth diddly until you’re properly presented.
Yes! This says it all.
Well, I lost 60 lbs 40 years ago, but the way I did it is not exactly one I would recommend for anyone – I got hit by a car when I was crossing the street and ended up with a fractured pelvis, broken tibia/fibula, and 3 upper front teeth broken. I spent 2 weeks in the hospital and 6 weeks in a nursing home, eating practically nothing (ever seen what passes for food in a nursing home?). I maintained that weight loss for 2 years, until I got pregnant with my son, and I not only gained back every pound I’d lost, but I gained an additional 60 lbs. So yeah, doesn’t matter how you lose the weight, it’s coming back, and most of the time? It’s bringing friends with it. If weight loss and maintenance were easy, there would be no fat people (as if we like being stigmatized, hated, blamed, shamed, etc).