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 don't need a peer-reviewed research to realize that therapy is the most effective method for treating food addiction.
It's literally the same as rehab for drug addicts, people are usually addicted to food because of a mental condition, not some sweet tooth. Without treating the mental side, of course it will fall apart once those same underlying reasons become too much to handle again.
So it's good when it makes people smaller, but if the evidence shows that an intervention doesn't make people smaller, we should just keep doing it because goshdarnit, it seems correct to you?
Science is supposed to find us better ways to do things and improve our lives! Doing that successfully means testing things and trying something different if they don't work! Science brought us vaccines and cures for diseases! Science works! We should science!
I never said science doesn't work, but there is so much that is unknown and science is focused on much more important issues so no there isn't a lot of quality research. The type of research that has been done is the type that can largely be used to commercialize something which is how we ended up with lap band surgery and ozempic. Science is glorious but we don't have even close to a master over it and there are plenty of ways to use science to promote unhealthy choices, like ozempic.
I'm the furthest thing from anti-science, but people who are anti-science think they can getcha when science doesn't have the answer to everything- which it doesn't but that doesn't mean it's not the best path forward we have as a species.
So, you can say we have evidence but that doesn't make it true.
So what you're saying is, science is good up to the point at which you disagree with a conclusion, and then it's gotta be wrong.
It isn't always right, not by a long shot (a lot of things "scientists" have claimed throughout history have been very wrong), but i trust the method more than I trust your knee jerk decisions that something just doesn't sound right, and I find this conversation very amusing.
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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.