Not only is weight loss possible, people are doing it all the time, a new study suggests.
In a survey of 4,000 obese Americans, 40 percent said they had lost 5 percent or more of their weight in the last year — enough to see a significant health benefit — and another 20 percent said they had lost 10 percent or more, according to the study published online last week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“I think there are stereotypes about obese people that they can’t lose weight and aren’t trying,” said Dr. Jacinda M. Nicklas, a clinical research fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who led the study.
Most of the successful weight losers used a multipronged approach, she said, exercising more, eating fewer calories, and taking prescription diet pills.
The ones who lost the most weight also joined a formal weight-loss program, Nicklas said. Other research and Nicklas’s own experience with her patients suggests that a variety of such programs can work, particularly if they cost money, requiring people to “put some skin in the game.”
People in the survey who said they tried to lose weight by eating diet foods and products were actually the most likely to gain weight, Nicklas found. “People overeat the diet products,” she said.