A new study in King’s College of London have found that it is possible only for a few people with obesity to put off some weight and return to a healthy body weight.. For adults, chances are even less. Researchers looked into electronic health reports of 130,000 women and more 150,000 women with obesity problem to see if there is any chance for them to reduce five percent of their body weight. People who went through bariatric weight loss surgery or any other sorts of surgical operations for weight loss were excluded from the study. Results showed that one in 12 men and one in 10 women lost five percent of their body weight in a year. More than half of the group of people with obesity regained weight they lost in two years and more than a quarter regained their weight in five years.
Therefore for obese people with a BMI of 30-35, one in 210 men and one in 124 women were able to reach a healthy body weight. But for those with a BMI of above 40, the probability of losing weight decreased with only one out of 1,290 men, and for women it is one in 677.
As reported by co-author Dr. Alison Fildes of King’s College London, via Eureka Alert, “Once an adult gets into obese conditions, it is very unlikely that they will return back to the weight of a standard healthy body. Newer and effective remedies are urgently needed to deal with this issue.” Fildes also said that the study has shown it is quite hard for obese people to lose 10% of their body weight and maintain it.
Dr. Fildes said in a rep[ort by BBC, “Instead of waiting for people to be obese, more effective strategies aimed for prevention of such outcomes should be in place to offset the difficulty of shedding the pounds that are hard to shake off .Treatment needs to focus on stopping people gaining more weight and maintaining even small levels of weight loss. Current strategies that focus on cutting calories and boosting physical activity aren’t working for most patients to achieve weight loss and maintain that. The greatest solution for fighting the obesity epidemic might be in public health policies to prevent it in the first place at a population level.”
