From Joe: We earlier reported the buzz about a Consumer Reports study of diet plans. Now Tara Parker-Pope advises us to be skeptical and tough-minded about successes claimed by commercial weight-loss programs:
The magazine said Jenny Craig had “the edge over the other big names” on the basis of a two-year study published last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association. In that study, 92 percent of 442 overweight and obese women stuck with the program for two years…They lost an average of about 16 pounds…But the magazine failed to report that the women in the study didn’t pay a dime to sign up for the Jenny Craig program. Unlike real Jenny Craig customers, they received $6,600 worth of membership fees and food during the two-year study…Today, someone who wanted to spend two years on the program would pay about $400 in registration fees and about $100 a week for packaged meals…
The study wasn’t designed to test the success of Jenny Craig in the real world, but to determine whether a free prepared-meal program could help people lose weight and keep it off.
Rena R. Wing…wrote an editorial in JAMA noting that the study results were most likely influenced by the fact that the diet program was free…[The question is] “will an obese individual enrolling in this or a similar structured commercial weight-loss program will achieve similar results,” she wrote. “Most likely, the answer is no.”
Among the many interesting reader comments, Tessa of Los Angeles, CA writes:
I lost nearly 50 pounds on Kashi, which used to have a cereal-shake-bar program similar to Slim-Fast, but gained most of it back over a 6 year period – my fault, I didn’t watch my weight. I’ve lost 40 pounds over the last 8 months following the Weight Watchers program and hope to keep it off this time.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/taking-measure-of-weight-loss
As usual, the bitter conclusion to be drawn is that to keep weight off permanently, changing what you eat is not good enough.
You have to change who you are, not what you eat. Or at least change part of who you are.