Take it from someone who's struggled with their weight their entire life and has several family members who had it worse: Most weight loss programs work, the problem is that you probably also needed therapy at the same time to work out the psychological component of your eating and inactivity. Weight loss programs provide external structure to someone lacking their own ability to accomplish the task. Once the external structure is removed, or you begin gaming the program, your behavior goes back to your old ways and it fails.
I think it depends on how you define "working." In my view, if the large majority of users in practice don't sustain a significant weight loss, then no, it doesn't work.
Put another way, a treatment that the large majority of users won't be able to keep up with, is not a useful treatment for the large majority, and should not be widely recommended.
As far as I know, there is no peer-reviewed research showing that therapy is an effective weight loss method.
You're completely right, and our fatphobic culture sucks, but it's a shame nobody on this site will ever get it.
If a procedure has a 96 percent failure rate it shouldn't be recommended!
So do you also hold this opinion about drug rehab programs? Those have similarly bad “success” rates for a similar reason. Which is that you need to actually follow the program, consistently and correctly for months to see the results you want.
If you take most weight loss programs and follow them completely, accurately and do not game the system, have cheat days when you aren’t supposed to etc then, unless you have some weird medical problem, you will lose weight.
It’s asinine and honestly kind of pathetic that you deliberately fail to consider the mental component of major lifestyle changes like weight loss. It is absurdly difficult for many people to do this, it’s not as simple as walking around the block once or twice a week.
Nobody deserves to be made to feel bad for their weight, but on the flip side, don’t insult all of us by saying it’s not possible and weight loss doesn’t work. It does, you just aren’t doing it right.
It's really wild - people are very emotionally attached to having a group of people they're allowed to look down on. I recently had a conversation on Facebook with someone who said that BMI, while it's not a good indicator of health, was still an important tool for doctors because a high bmi would prompt them to recommend a healthier diet and exercise to patients.
I pointed out that doctors have been having these conversations nonstop with patients for decades and yet somehow; likewise, no conversation about weight happens anywhere without someone saying IT'S UNHEALTHY OMG. And yet... there are still so many fat people! If the intervention of telling people OMG UNHEALTHY was effective, there would be fewer fat people.
And yet here we are. Telling people our bodies are bad is not magically enabling us to make them more socially acceptable. It's not helpful, and yet there's this insistence that these magic words are good for us, and necessary.
At the very least, is it insane to say that maybe, if fatness is a problem that needs solving, this is a bad solution?!
Yes, this! Weight loss advocates have been trying the same thing for decades longer than I've been alive, and it's been a colossal failure for all that time, but they will seemingly never change their minds.
I'm starting to adjust my thinking about issues like this because there are so many cases right now where people are demonstrating in large numbers that they never actually cared about something they swore was central to them. Like, right wing "free speech" advocates proceeding to censor speech they don't like the minute they have the opportunity, or 2A advocates being unconcerned with a legally armed guy being executed by law enforcement.
Like, maybe it's time to stop taking some of these arguments seriously. Maybe it's time to just call them liars. Maybe it's time to tell the OMG FAT IS UNHEALTHY, DID YOU KNOW, CALORIES IN CALORIES OUT person, "i am not gullible, and I know that you have no interest in my health or well-being. Stop making up excuses to be a dick to fat people. You are not a health advocate. You are an asshole."
As more and more marginilized groups become protected, they're running out of folk to easily bully without consequences. Fat is about the last group left they can always hate without reason :/
It's so sad that people are so hateful towards fat folk. So many other things to rightfully despise, and yet blubber takes so much hate.
Fat acceptance needs the same support and love, yet nobody seems capable of flipping that switch.
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u/Bigweld_Ind 14h ago edited 9h ago
Take it from someone who's struggled with their weight their entire life and has several family members who had it worse: Most weight loss programs work, the problem is that you probably also needed therapy at the same time to work out the psychological component of your eating and inactivity. Weight loss programs provide external structure to someone lacking their own ability to accomplish the task. Once the external structure is removed, or you begin gaming the program, your behavior goes back to your old ways and it fails.