Understanding the results of medical research can be frustrating. Often TV, newspapers and magazines cover anything related to diets because consumers are so interested. This coverage is often superficial, distorted and in some cases tainted by people using a news-type approach to market their own product.
If you want to know more, it is now very easy to access medical journals online. Yet, many of the well-designed studies only report the average weight lost for a given program or approach. Intuitively you know that some people will lose more weight than others. Some people enrolled in a study probably were not very motivated to lose weight and may have actually gained.
Average weight loss doesn’t tell you what percentage of people actually lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off. To help a person better answer this question, several researchers re-analyzed study results. Among participants in intense programs where people committed about an hour per week, about half of the individuals lost five percent or more of their starting weight—about a third of those lost more than ten percent. In less intense programs, about a third of people lost five percent or more. If you are reading this right now your chances of success are probably higher that the results of several weight loss studies because you are starting with an interest in succeeding. (The full results of the analysis will be published in the International Journal of Obesity in 2010.)
