There's an often quoted statistic that 95% of all people who lose much weight soon regain it. I'm skeptical of the statistic because:

• I know that, however those numbers are collected, I don't show up in them, as I've never been polled on the subject, and never been enrolled in a weight-loss program or treated for obesity. Of course I'm just one person, but the same would apply to anyone else in similar circumstances.
• I know more people who have successfully lost a lot of weight and kept it off than who are currently fat. Virtually none of them show up in any statistics either.
• It stands to reason that programs and doctors can't do anything one can't do for oneself (given that drugs and surgery are currently (and rightly) in disrepute for weight loss), and considering the price of programs and medical treatments, I can't believe anyone would opt for them unless they had tried and failed on their own. Since programs provide nothing new, failures mostly remain failures. Especially if they expect to just lie back, pay money, and "get fixed".
• I've posted a query to several newsgroups and mailing lists relating to health, nutrition, exercise, or weight loss, asking if anyone had followed the MacDougall/Ornish/Pritikin/Rodale/Bailey plans and failed to lose all excess weight and keep it off. Only one claimed she had.
• A Consumer Reports (June 1993 issue) poll of all readers showed about a 1/3 success rate, mosty do-it-yourself. And their poll was biased, in that it only queried readers who had "attemted to lose weight in the past three years". People like me who had done it five years earlier fell through the cracks. As did those who did it ten years ago, or fifteen, or twenty, etc. (In context, it was a reasonable restriction on their poll, since it was intended to evaluate currently available commercial weight loss programs, not to determine the true long term success rate of weight loss.)
• When you see a fat person, you don't know if they have even attempted to lose weight. They may not have. When you see a thin person, you don't know whether they may have formerly been fat. Nobody can tell by looking at me that I ever weighed more than I do now. (Actually, one nurse did ask me, when I was donating blood. I don't know how she could tell.)
• Many fat people never even attempt to lose weight, in part because of this bogus statistic.

• Return to Keith Lynch's weight loss page.
• Return to Keith Lynch's home page.