Success rates of weight loss programs

For one, how do you report the drop-outs? Another is finding the people years after treatment and confirming their weights. If you do it by phone, there is no way to confirm or deny the outcome. If you ask people to come in, the number that are willing can be quite small. In addition to logistics, the bigger problem is the criteria to measure success. If it is simply weight loss maintained, what do you do with the person who is already too thin and should be gaining rather than losing?

Is it successful if the person is eating healthy and in moderation, exercising at least 3 times per week but has not lost any weight and whose weight may be the same one year later? What do you do with the natural pattern of weight gain over the lifespan?

If you gain only 5 pounds when the average is 8 pounds, have you failed to maintain your weight loss during that time? It is not simple nor is it easy. With the burn rate approach, success cannot simply be measured by pounds lost and maintained. Success rate has to account for people whose burn rate is already low, should not lose any more weight, and may even gain weight as they naturally age.

It has to account for the person who can lose a small amount of weight and keep it off as well as the person who has the capacity to lose a large amount of weight. In order to succeed, the person needs to have their daily calorie intake be within the normal or recommended range. There is no dispute in the scientific community or among rational people outside of it that if you burn more calories than you consume every day by eating healthy and exercising, you will lose weight.

In the United States, the low success rate of all diet plans -- healthy or unhealthy, scientifically backed or not -- seems to be a measure of how unwilling people are to do the work of changing their lifestyles. According to the Weight Watchers website, once you join the online Points Plus program -- for a membership fee -- you'll have access to more than 15, recipes. The plan also offers suggestions for lifestyle change -- tips on building a support network, developing an awareness of habitual behaviors that have kept you overweight, and incorporating exercise into your daily routine.

If Weight Watchers doesn't work for you, it's not a matter of the plan's success rate any more than it's a failure on your part. The Harvard School of Public Health website states that "behavioral, psychological, and social factors are probably far more important for weight loss than the mix of nutrients in a diet.

However, the experience of trying diet programs like Weight Watchers could give you a foundation for making smart choices that fit your individual tastes. Despite its fad-diet name, the Flat Belly Diet takes a very sound nutritional approach. The Whole30 diet is paleo on steroids. It recommends eliminating sugar, grains, legumes, dairy, soy, and alcohol completely from your diet for a month.

This will almost certainly be effective, since it will force you to eat pretty much only meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and eggs. The real question is whether you can maintain such an aggressive diet indefinitely. Adherence to this program is low, which is why it ends up at the bottom of the rankings. Best weight loss program overall: Nutrisystem. Nutrisystem is a great all-around choice because of how easy it makes it to stick to the program.

You get great-tasting meals delivered, which takes the work out of shopping, meal planning, and calorie counting. If you want a fast and easy program, this should be your pick. The South Beach Diet is low in carbohydrates and high in protein, plus offers meal delivery right to your door. Men often struggle with weight loss diets because preparing all your own food takes a lot of work not to mention cooking skill.

Nutrisystem makes it easy to sidestep this challenge: not only are your meals pre-made; the calories are already counted out. Fortunately, the WW app is super intuitive and easy to use, making it a great choice if you want to use an app to guide your weight loss program. For adults age 50 and older, a focus on overall health is a big factor when choosing a weight loss program.

The Mayo Clinic Diet, developed in consultation with experts on everything from heart health to brain health, is perfectly suited for older adults who want to make sure their overall health improves along with the number on the scale.

Research shows that support from peers or from a coach helps increase your chances of weight loss success. WW capitalizes on this research, offering both peer support groups and coaching sessions to keep you on track to hit your weight loss goals. Pretty much anyone off the street overweight or not can name the ingredients of a successful weight loss program, but the actual statistics on how people do when they try to lose weight are pretty dismal.

The long-term success rates four or five years out are, as you might imagine, even worse. Successful weight loss is so rare that there is actually a national registry of people who have successfully lost weight and maintained it 2. You could write an entire book on the reasons why people fail to succeed at weight loss programs on their own.

Indeed, many books and scientific articles have been written on exactly this topic! Good weight loss programs are a formalized way to combat all of these pressures that make weight loss an uphill battle. Could you go it alone?

Sure, and many people do. But statistically, you stand a better chance of weight loss if you join up with a program. Across a wide range of randomized controlled trials, people who are randomly assigned to a commercial weight loss program fare better than those who are randomly assigned to control interventions, which generally consist of broad advice or individual counseling sessions on diet and exercise, without the rigor and formalism of planned weight loss programs.

If you have tried and failed at weight loss before, signing up for a weight loss program is a way to boost your chances at success a second time around. To make our list of the best weight loss programs, we only considered formal and fully fleshed-out programs with specific guidelines. Part of the success of a weight loss program lies in the structure imposed by the program. Moreover, we only considered weight loss programs from legitimate companies that have demonstrated success, either through popular adoption or through rigorous scientific research.

Our research team capitalized on the findings of an exhaustive scientific review published in in the Annals of Internal Medicine which examined 45 different scientific studies on weight loss programs 39 of which were randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of modern evidence based medicine research 3.

Informed by the data from the latest scientific research, we also analyzed how practical and flexible a weight loss program is. Based on the research so far, more conventional programs like Jenny Craig and WW outperform the newer and more aggressive weight loss programs, which is why the latter ended up lower in our rankings.

We realize that not every weight loss program is right for everyone. Weight loss programs can help jump-start people to change their diet. Obesity rates are growing at a tremendous rate, and the health problems that are associated with it are increasing as well. The scientific literature makes one thing very clear: most people are unsuccessful when it comes to weight loss. A group of experts commissioned by the National Health Institutes in described the dismal state of self-directed weight loss 3.

Most often, weight lost during a diet is regained within six to nine months after the program finishes. People tend to revert back to their initial habits, and regain all the weight they lost. Programs make weight loss easier than going it alone.

A better solution than a haphazard self-directed diet and exercise program is a regimented program that provides guidelines on how to enforce a more systematic change in your lifestyle and break the old habits that led you to become overweight in the first place.

This is where weight loss programs come in. A systematic review of commercial weight loss programs published in in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine described the potential benefits of weight loss programs 4.

According to the authors, a wide range of studies support the efficacy of commercial weight loss intervention programs, though the programs vary in their short and long-term success. Two key variables to look at with a weight loss program are the initial weight lost and the long-term results one to two years after the program starts.

Initial weight loss is primarily a function of the amount of caloric restriction that a program imposes, so an intensive program like HRM Program or Optifast, both of which involve fairly strong caloric intake restriction, can produce substantial weight losses in the short term.

The question with these is whether you can sustain the results long-term. As an example, commercial programs like weight watchers and Jenny Craig result in losses from 2. Long-term weight loss appears to be more of a function of lifestyle choices than specific food choices. One study on people in the National Weight Control Registry, a large group of people who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off for at least five years, found that key weight maintenance behaviors include a consistent diet pattern, not skipping breakfast, and exercising at least an hour per day 5.

Regardless of how it happens, the direct benefits of weight loss are numerous.