Michelle Allison

one study was about weight loss MAINTENANCE specifically, and the follow up was one month one month a month one (1)

What I'm learning is that our two different perspectives have such wildly different definitions of "success" (i.e. I think a 16.7% success rate is more of a failure, and they think an 83.3% failure rate is more of a success) that we'll never reconcile with each other. Oh well.

and for the one-month paper, I mean, I get it if you want to only study people with recent weight loss attempts, but don't title your paper "weight loss maintenance," it just doesn't look good

A quote I found quite revealing: "The difficulty in...long-term weight loss has been challenged by recent studies showing that several individuals are able to maintain acceptable weight loss" SEVERAL

I feel bad I know people work hard on this I know people believe themselves to have good intentions I know everyone's gotta get paid but you're misleading people who have higher expectations, and whose DOCTORS hold them to higher expectations, of lasting weight loss

Doing studies is fine, reporting whatever the actual findings are is fine, but the titles and the discussion sections are trying THE MOST to sell these as much more impressive results than they are. It actually makes my search much harder, because I constantly feel misled.

there is a serious mismatch between cultural ideas of the likelihood of long-term weight loss and what the research shows but the research seems to try to brand itself as meeting that cultural definition and then you look at the numbers

I wanna add that even talking about this makes me feel a little squeamish, even though I have looked at this literature many times over the years and come to similar conclusions, and even though I'm openly anti-dieting it still just feels so taboo to state this plainly

why is that because there is a weird culture of intimidation and social aggression around this topic

because my EXTREMELY MINOR brushes with that have left me scarred and hesitant but I have to call it as I see it, as a fat person as well as a dietitian: the statistics are unimpressive and almost meaningless in terms of our cultural expectations and beliefs about weight loss

clinicians and researchers may see these modest successes as a reason to keep working, to see if they can expand those successes, and that is valid but it is equally valid for people to choose to go about their lives without prioritizing an activity with such modest results

and it's extremely valid to ask people to label their research accurately so we can more easily see the state of the research as it actually is: a minority of people (<17%) can sustain modest amounts of weight loss (3-10%) over a few (1-5) years that's what I've found, so far