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 Over roughly the past three decades, the proportion of adults who
are overweight and obese has surged from 53 percent to 66 percent,
researchers report in JAMA. Over that same period, the proportion of
heavy adults trying to lose weight dropped from 56 percent to 49
percent.
Losing weight is hard, and keeping it off is even harder. This may
explain at least some of the waning national interest in weight
loss, said senior study author Dr. Jian Zhang, a public health
researcher at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.
"It's hard to drop pounds," Zhang said by email. "It's a life-long
commitment and painful, and many of us have tried and failed, tried
and failed, and finally failed to try anymore."
A lot of heavier adults are probably also seeing so many other
overweight and obese people that they feel comfortable at their
current size and don't feel social pressure to slim down.
"This might be explained, at least partially, by increasing evidence
that adults who are overweight may live as long as and sometimes
even longer than normal weight adults," Zhang said.
The decline in weight-loss efforts occurred mostly among adults who
were overweight but not yet obese, Zhang added.
For the study, researchers analyzed data from a nationally
representative health survey for three time periods: 1988 to 1994,
1999 to 2004 and 2009 to 2014.
Among other things, the survey asked overweight and obese adults if
they had tried to lose weight during the past 12 months.
Black women experienced the steepest decline in weight loss efforts
from the first study period to the last. In the late 1980s and early
90s, 66 percent of overweight and obese black women said they were
trying to lose weight, but by the final study period this dropped to
55 percent.
At the same time, the proportion of obese and overweight black women
surged much more than for white women, the study also found. By the
end of the final study period, 79 percent of black women were
overweight or obese, compared with 59 percent of white women.
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Limitations of the study include its reliance on survey participants
to accurately recall and report their weight and height to allow
researchers to calculate whether they might be overweight or obese,
the authors note.
It's also possible to see the results in a positive light, said
Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University in Boston
who wasn't involved in the study. That's because despite the
challenges, millions of Americans are still trying to lose weight.
"People haven't given up," Roberts said by email.
For more of them to succeed, however, we may need to rethink what
weight management means, Roberts added. Things doctors have
recommended to overweight patients for years like logging food in a
diary, using willpower to resist overeating and getting 10,000 steps
a day haven't worked.
"It doesn't address the basic neurobiology of how our brains think
about food," Roberts added. "We can't use willpower to think
ourselves out of hunger because willpower doesn't reach the
unconscious brain."
The bathroom scale, however, is a simple tool that can work -
especially for people who are overweight but not yet obese.
"I think a really important strategy is catching it quick," Roberts
said. "Buying a bathroom scale if you don’t have one and weighing
yourself regularly is so important because it's not that hard to
lose five pounds with almost any diet method, and if you have a line
in the sand that if you go over it you eat carefully for a couple of
weeks you can make a big difference."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2miKqSv JAMA, online March 7, 2017.
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