Day 99 – Weight Loss Plans: Better Than Medical Help?

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

~ Confucius

177.8 lbs

So you want to lose weight, and you’re smart enough to not starve yourself as I did. Like many things in life it comes down to three little words: in this case, “diet and exercise”.

Creams and pills that promise to do the job for you are just sucker bait looking to rob you of your money. Fad diets are fads for a reason – they come as fast as they go because they work about as well at losing weight as cooked spaghetti works at carving granite.

But what about diet plans like Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and all that? If only someone qualified would weigh in on how well those work.

Here to weigh in on how well those work is Dr Susan Jebb, a general practitioner and member of the Medical Research Council. She performed a study contrasting obese people who joined Weight Watchers in the UK with those who received GP care through the National Health Service (NHS). The result? Weight Watchers members lost about twice the weight that GP patients did.

Weight Watchers provided part of the funding for Susan’s study, but she stressed that similar plans by Weight Watchers main competitors would be just as effective so I’m not ready to yellow-card her for bias.

In the UK, GPs can buy a patient a 12 week Weight Watchers course for about £45 – far less than the cost of 12 weeks of regular doctor visits. Susan and her colleagues studied this referral scheme, as well as similar ones running in Australia and Germany.

Over one year’s time Northampton GPs referred 1/2 of 772 overweight patients to weekly Weight Watchers meetings, paid for by the doctor’s surgery, and the other half got GP-led care typically consisting of providing pamphlets on healthy eating & scheduled appointments with a nurse for weigh-ins and advice.

At regular intervals throughout the year the patients from both plans had their weight recorded to see the results. Believe it or not, at each measurement appointment the Weight Watchers group came out ahead. Once the year was up, the results were still in Weight Watcher’s favour: that group had lost twice as much – nearly 7kg (15lbs) on average per patient, compared to around 3kg (6lbs) in the GP-led group.

Some of you may be thinking “a year of dieting and only 15 lbs lost?” Compared to the 62 lbs I lost in 99 days, it seems small… but slow weight loss that stays off is waaay more healthy, and even a loss of 15 lbs can make a big impact on an overweight person’s health. As Susan points out, ” “Losing four to five kilograms can halve a person’s diabetes risk if they are overweight, so even a little can be beneficial.”

“We know a lot of people are overweight and need to lose weight. The challenge is how you do it.” she continued. “In the NHS we do not have the resources for a massive weight management programme. But this would be cost effective.”

Once agaon Susan notes that Weight Watchers isn’t unique, and that any similar programme with regular weight checks, goal-setting, and peer support could have the same effect. “It’s having a weekly weigh-in and the accountability it brings with it, as well as the support of the group, that seems to work,” Susan emphasized. “People are more likely to stick at it.”

Also, fewer patients dropped out of the trial from the Weight Watchers group than the GP one… although more than half of all of the people studied dropped out overall. Dieting isn’t easy. Neither is being obese, but you don’t have to go to meetings to be able to sit on a couch and eat yourself to death.

There were a couple of problems with some of the demographics who they offered the Weight Watchers treatments to. Why was that, Susan? “Men may not feel it’s the right group for them, nor some ethnic groups. It’s certainly not some panacea for the nation’s weight problems.”

“But”, she added, “GPs can now be confident that here is a way they can really help some of their patients that’s based on evidence.”

BBC News reports that the health advisory body National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) already recommends in guidelines that GPs should consider referring overweight patients to a commercial provider.

It makes a lot of sense; Weight Watchers and other support-and-measured-food groups are more cost efficient than having the government try to set up similar ones this late in the game; unless the private ones do something insidious, they have the edge.

Susan and her colleagues will be presenting the results of their trial at the International Conference on Obesity in Stockholm this week.