Obese people may never achieve normal weight, a study reveals

According to a recent study, there is some bad news for all the obese people out there trying to get back in shape; it’s never going to happen, at least not without surgical intervention. Wight loss is something that many people have to deal with. The study revealed that for obese people, the odds of reaching a normal weight is next to impossible. The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health and it showed that the odds of an obese person achieving normal weight are just 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women.The people involved in the study were more successful at managing to lose enough weight to improve their health, which was a drop of at least 5 per cent of their body weight. However, they were not able to maintain the lower weight. The lead researcher, Alison Fildes who is also a research psychologist at the University College London said,” What our findings suggest is that current strategies used to tackle obesity are not helping the majority of these obese patients to lose weight and maintain that weight loss. This might be because people are unable to access weight loss interventions or because the interventions being offered are ineffective or both.”

Image Source: newseveryday

This study was based on the analysis of more than 278,000 people from the UK’s clinical Practice research database which was collected between 2004 and 2014. The data suggested that the obese people had trouble in maintaining the weight loss that they achieved through dieting or exercises. The data included people aged more than 20 and were defined as obese or overweight based on the reading of the BMI tests they had to go through.However, this study did not include the people who had undergone bariatric weight-loss surgery. The average age of the men for this study was 55 and that for the women was 49.

The researchers found that the higher a person’s BMI was, the lower was the possibility of them attaining normal weight. As for the morbidly obese people the possibility of achieving normal weight was as low as 1 in 1290 for men and 1 in 677 for women. The CDC has said that reducing at least 5 per cent of body weight can help to improve health, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugars etc., the standard which many of the obese people were able to achieve. During the nine year study, the researchers found that at least 46 per cent of the men and 53 per cent of women reduced at least 5 percent of their body weight.