Does this happen to thin people?

A couple days ago I followed a link to Ragen Chastain’s blog Dances with Fat and a recent post on what to do when your doctor says the first thing to do for your ailment is to lose weight. Short answer: ask “Does this happen to thin people? Then lets try the treatment you would use for a thin person.”

That led to another post on that blog from 2014 which says weight loss doesn’t work. Though the post is a few years old it is timely when Weight Watchers is changing its name in unspoken admission that almost everyone who goes through their program eventually regains their weight and usually a bit more.

So, yeah, there isn’t any research that says dieting works. And a lot that says it doesn’t. But that message isn’t getting out. Yes, there are – rare – individuals who diet and can keep the weight off. That’s usually enough to motivate us to do the same. Alas, without that goal we aren’t as motivated to eat a healthy diet, regardless of whether our weight goes down.

Chastain points out:

If a prescription fails almost all the time, often having the exact opposite of the intended result, (and especially when that happens consistently for more than 50 years,) the solution is not to keep prescribing that intervention and tell people to try harder, or to call the pill by a different name.

But there is the diet culture. We have to fight against the idea that the only good body is a thin body. Public health should be about making true information available and letting people make their own decisions. We also need to stop stigmatizing fat people. Perhaps our health would improve! Let’s find out.