Do No Harm & Unpacking Weight Science

“Sustained weight loss of greater than 5% of body weight is rare. Even when people adhere to strict, high-volume exercise, weight loss varies. Both in naturalistic, longitudinal samples and in randomized controlled trials, various weight-loss efforts and strategies lead to long-term weight gain. Furthermore, a person’s perception (or in children, their parents’ perception) that they are overweight also leads to long-term weight gain, not weight maintenance or loss, regardless of their BMI, suggesting that awareness-raising conversations about body weight can do more harm than good.” The National Weight Control Registry is a popular resource used to represent the opposite-that people can sustain weight loss in the long term. However, this study only uses the "statistical unicorns"-those people who lose weight and keep it off more than 2-5 years. It is important to note that these "statistical unicorns" are the study's outliers. An outlier is a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set. Therefore you can not make any conclusions using these outliers to tell us about what is true/helpful for the vast majority of humans.

In addition to the article linked below, a great resource I want to add is the incredible Fiona Willer. She is the expert of unpacking the weight science. Unfortunately much of the science we hear that promotes weight loss and fear mongering of foods are just plain wrong. However, how are we to know if we don’t know how to critically look at the science? Lucky for us, Fiona Willer AdvAPD is great at this and has made it one of her missions to take apart the science to bring you the truth. Subscribe to her HealthNotDiets Digest to receive a weekly round up of weight-neutral articles, blogs, research, clinical guidelines and shareables. Listen to Fiona and Laura Thomas, PHD and RD as they discuss the “statistical union” on Laura’s podcast “Don’t Salt My Game.”