Episode Details

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Reader Barbara sent me an article with the headline “How to Maintain Weight Loss, According to People Who Succeeded.” The article was about a study called “In their own words: Topic analysis of the motivations and strategies of over 6,000 long-term weight-loss maintainers” by Phelan et. al. (as always, I don’t link to research or articles that include fatphobic content.)

The premise:This is a study, funded by a grant for Weight Watchers (aka WW) that analyzes 6,139 subjects’ responses to six open-ended questions. Two of the study authors are current employees and shareholders in Weight Watchers.

I think it’s important to put this in context. They have 6,139  people who participated, out of a total of 7,419 who are part of Weight Watcher’s “success registry” (more on this later). Weight Watchers (aka WW) had 4.5 million subscribers at the end of 2020 alone (which was down 4.3% year over year). The subjects here represent just 0.14% of that, the total membership of their “success registry” is just 0.16% of their 2020 enrollment alone.  So, like the NWCR before it, it is highly likely that this study is simply finding commonalities among outliers.

Inclusion Criteria:In order to be included in the study, participants had to lose greater than or equal to 20.0621lbs (9.1 kg) and they only had to maintain it for one year. The average maintenance period was 3.4 years.

About a century of research shows that people who lose weight tend to regain it within five years so the fact that they’ve used inclusion criteria less than that is questionable.

It should also be noted that at the time of the study the “maintainers” had gained an average of thirteen pounds from their lowest weight, suggesting that the study authors and I have a different interpretation of the word “maintain.”

Also, 67.3 percent of the “maintainers” were still categorized as “overw*ight” or “ob*se” Now, those are nonsense categories, made up to pathologize bodies based on size, and drive profit to the weight loss industry (and creating a lot of harm to those who are labeled as such.) But I point this out because these are categories that are used by this industry to drive profit. I think it’s important to know that two-thirds of this sample would still be targeted by Weight Watchers as potential customers, even though, here, they are considering them to be successes.

IntroductionThe first half of their first sentence says “Modest weight loss can reduce long-term risk of cardiometabolic disease”

There is no citation for this, and I assume that because it’s not a statement of fact. We’ve explored this myth before, and also that research shows that weight-neutral interventions provide greater benefits with fewer risks (for example, Gaesser and Angadi found that increases in cardiorespiratory fitness and physical activity are consistently associated with greater reductions in mortality risk than is intentional weight loss.)

Back to the Weight Watchers study, the second half of their first introductory sentence /[adm