Another study of weight loss programs

Must be the New Year's Resolutions. The Annals of Internal Medicine, January 4, 2005 issue, published a study of popular weight loss program research (i.e., the authors looked at the published research, but didn't do a clinical study themselves). At this site, you won't be able to have free access to the article for 6 months, but you can read the summary for patients, which is probably all you need. Programs studied were Weight Watchers, Health Management Resources (medical), Optifast, Jenny Craig, TOPS and OA.

Here's how "evidence based research" works. The study with the most studies wins! So in this article, Weight Watchers comes out on top because the other plans have had fewer really good studies published!

In the "Rapid Response," a reader from Health Management Resources responds:

"It is difficult to see how the authors reached the conclusion that Weight Watchers was the most successful program especially since they acknowledge that HMR’s weight losses are greater than 20% of initial weight (50-60 lbs). By their own analysis, participants in Weight Watchers were keeping off 3.2% of initial body weight at two years while HMR participants were keeping off 15.2% (6.4 vs. 30.4 lbs for a 200 lb person). For people needing to lose weight and decrease their medical risk factors (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, hypertension) a loss of 6 lbs. is barely sufficient. Research clearly shows that greater weight loss leads to greater changes in medical risk factors."

It's not trendy, but I still say, eat all your colors, drink a lot of water, eat less and move more. But most importantly, give it a year or two until you change your eating habits.