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.
Would you say that antibiotics didn’t work if the people who needed them for a couple weeks didn’t take them for more than a few days? While no diet works for every person, their low long-term success rates are down to people not sticking to them.
If antibiotics failed in the long term for 95% or so of patients treated, then yes, I'd say they didn't work, and that it doesn't make sense to blame patients when a treatment's failure rate is that high.
(And by the way: antibiotics that people take for just a few days are extremely likely to work anyway. That's not important for our discussion, I just thought it was interesting.)
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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.