A team of British researchers has demonstrated that conventional obesity treatment and management focused on diet and exercise are effective neither in reducing weight nor in preventing the weight from being regained in the five years that follow.
The probability of a moderately obese person (BMI of 30-35) attaining normal body weight following a weight management intervention is 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women. For patients suffering from severe obesity (BMI greater than 40), the probability is even lower: 1 in 1,290 for men and 1 in 677 for women.Programmes that focus on dieting and boosting physical activity are failing to help the majority of obese patients. A more effective way, suggests experts, is to have public health policies that target obesity. Photo: Filepic
These findings emerged from a study of UK health records led by King’s College London and financed by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
To arrive at these findings, published in the American Journal Of Public Health, the researchers tracked 278,982 participants (129,194 men and 149,788 women) suffering from obesity. The patients all followed a diet and exercise regime and were tracked between November 1, 2004 and October 31, 2014.
Overall, only 1,283 men and 2,245 women suffering from moderate obesity with a BMI of 30-35 managed to attain normal body weight.
Weight cycling, with both increases and decreases in body weight, was also observed in more than a third of participants. The study concludes that current weight management programs fail to achieve sustained weight loss in the majority of obese patients.
The annual probability of obese patients losing 5 percent of their weight is 1 in 12 for men and 1 in 10 for women. For those who achieve 5% weight loss, 53% regained the weight in the two years that followed and 78% in the five years that followed.
“Current strategies to tackle obesity, which mainly focus on cutting calories and boosting physical activity, are failing to help the majority of obese patients to shed weight and maintain that weight loss,” states Professor Martin Gulliford, senior author from the Division of Health and Social Care Research at King’s College London. “The greatest opportunity for stemming the current obesity epidemic is in wider-reaching public health policies to prevent obesity in the population.”
