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janeir0 wrote:

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Ramona Balboa wrote:

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Most do have a high BMI, but statistically, they still are doing better than the averages. Most medical studies view 10% of weight loss as a success, so these people have all kept off 20 to 30% at least. Few studies do long-term follow-up but of those that do, the stats are around 83% of people who regain all the weight from diet programs after two years. Most long-term diet only studies show weight gain above the base line weight after two years.

Where did you get this statistic from? I've seen that claim before, with as high of a percentage as 95%. I've lost about 85lbs two years ago, and have gained maybe like 10lbs back. I've talked to other people who have also lost a LOT of weight and didn't gain it back. This number just seems to be made up.

Good for you!

I got it from an article in American Psychologist--a meta-analysis of weight loss studies published in 2007. The main point of the article was that there are remarkably few randomized prospective longitudinal studies of weight loss and what studies do exist all have methodological flaws. The focuse is on diet-only weight loss, which apparently does not work. Only significant lifestyle changes that include extensive daily exercise makes a difference, which is why so many of the people we saw on the show had become trainers, I'm sure. The ones who tried to fit an hour and a half of exercise into their regular daily lives weren't able to keep it up.

The article is open access:
http://mann.bol.ucla.edu/...s/Diets_don%27t_work.pdf

The 83% was cherry picked from one part of the article. However, the overall conclusion for diet-only was even bleaker.

... we were able to locate 14 studies that followed participants for at least four years after a diet (see Table 1 for the features of these studies). The average weight loss on these diets was 14 kg (30.8 lb), and by the long-term follow-up, participants had gained back all but 3 of those kilograms (6.6 lb). Eight of the studies reported (or made it possible to compute) the percentage of participants who weighed more at follow-up than before they went on the diet. These rates averaged 41% and ranged from 29% (Pekkarinen & Mustajoki, 1997) to 64% (Wadden, Sternberg, Letizia, Stunkard, & Foster, 1989), including one study that found that 50% of the participants weighed more than 5 kg (11 lb) above their starting weight by five years after the diet (Foster, Kendall, Wadden, Stunkard, & Vogt, 1996)..... Even in the studies with the longest follow-up times (of four or five years postdiet), the weight regain trajectories did not typically appear to level off (e.g., Hensrud, Weinsier, Darnell, & Hunter, 1994; Kramer, Jeffery, Forster, & Snell, 1989), suggesting that if participants were followed for even longer, their weight would continue to increase...

So, my point was these people aren't thin, but if they managed to stay thinner for a number of years, they still beat the odds.

ETA: and aside from emphasizing moving lard asses off the couch, I completely agree that BL teaches a delusion of what weight loss is. Magic wand and I'm a model in 9 weeks. Weight loss in a totally alien environment. My favorite moment was whoever it was that had Jillian's voice coming out of her treadmill.