Jan. 06--Here on the hopeful threshold of the new year, the last thing anyone wants to hear is that losing that excess weight we've been lugging around doesn't matter.
So when a new study comes along that seems to tell us just that, we could let it dash our resolutions and have another cookie. Or, we could actually read the research and find out that what it's telling us is that, when it comes to losing excess weight and getting healthy, procrastination kills.
So put down the cookie and fetch your sneakers.
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New research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that, too often, many of us put off weight loss until our excess weight has already eroded our health--setting in motion heart disease, Type 2 diabetes or even cancer, all conditions linked to obesity. When our bodies are already under attack by disease, or hounded by its imminent prospect, we tend to lose weight, sometimes without even trying.
Maybe we even lose enough to exit the rolls of the obese -- an achievement we should fear, not welcome, for it is often a harbinger of imminent death.
In fact, dropping that much weight intentionally is depressingly rare: Research has found that fewer than 5% of those who lose a substantial amount of weight maintain that weight loss for five years or more. Once obesity has been established, most who intentionally lose enough to enter the "normal healthy weight" category gain back their lost weight -- often adding more -- studies find.
The latest study looks at weight and risk of death. Its authors set out to replicate an influential 2013 finding that spurred a hypothesis widely known as the "obesity paradox." Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that being overweight (with a body mass index from 25 to 29.9) seemed to confer some protection against premature death, and that the mildly obese (those with a BMI from 30 to 34.9) were at no higher risk of premature death that those of normal weight.
What the authors of the current study found instead is that, to accurately gauge risk of premature death in a large population of people, it's more revealing to ask people what their highest lifetime weight has been rather than to ask--as most researchers have done--what their weight is now.
In epidemiological surveys of Americans, people who were once obese but are no longer are generally counted as people of "normal healthy weight." But the current study's lead author, Boston University demographer Andrew Stokes, says such people are far more likely to have lost that weight unintentionally, due to illness, than to be among the few who have intentionally lost lots of weight and kept it off through sheer tenacity.
