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Comment by mmmmmbop | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a citation on that 0.1%? I'd love to learn more.

The number one in a thousand is simply a ballpark figure that is frequently used in nutritional science. There are literally hundreds of papers, and not all of them are good (you should look at the parameters because many of them are quite lax), but here are a few examples easily found online.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030646...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07315724.1999.10...

https://europepmc.org/article/med/2663745

Perhaps you should read your own sources. From the abstract of the second study: "At the 3-year follow-up, 53% of the original sample (of 621 persons) maintained losses of 5% or more and 35% losses of 10% or more.". From the third study: "When successful weight maintenance was defined as maintaining a weight loss of 5% or 10% of initial (pre-treatment) body weight, 40% were maintaining a 5% weight loss at five years and 25% were maintaining a weight loss of 10% at 7 years." The other studies also don't back up your 0.1% estimate.

Your initial statement is completely misleading and shockingly you have provided hard evidence against it.

Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. You really need to look at the parameters (as well as the data).

A 5% weight loss for a 200-pound person equals 10 pounds. Anyone can achieve this by following a fad diet for a week or two.

Here is what you wrote:

> Permanent weight loss of more than ten pounds is nearly impossible from a scientific standpoint. The success rate after 5 years of weight loss is somewhere around 0.1%.

Your sources indicate that your initial statement was wrong by a factor of ~100 at least.

If you deliberately misinterpret what I'm saying, I suppose I'm mistaken.

The majority of these studies consider a weight loss of 10 pounds over two years to be successful. If you start with 100 pounds or more, that is almost nothing.

Many of them consider anyone who starts at 300, loses 100, and gains 80 back in five years to be a huge success. Is it really?

In healthcare, an obese person is typically considered successful if they lose more than 30% of their body weight permanently. This is extremely unlikely to happen without surgery or medication.

Mate these studies are very clearly talking about percentages here, so they are directly comparable. You said 0.1% could lose 10 pounds over five years, the studies you cited mention 25-35% are able to do at least that after five years - the average man in the US is 200 pounds, and these are obese people, so the loss was actually higher than 10 pounds. Now you are changing the goal posts to 30%!

A good diet and exercise routine can have wonderful results, even in the long-term. The percentage of success in losing significant weight with those methods is far, far above 0.1%, and I think people should be aware of that.

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