I was obese[0] 3 months ago, and had been that way for about two years. Now I'm a healthy weight. It was easy to do with minimal lifestyle changes - calorie tracking, minor dietary changes, and couch to 5k running a couple of times a week.
The way most studies of weight loss work is by recruiting a pool of obese applicants. This is intrinsically biased: someone who has had a lifelong struggle with obesity can be recruited across 100% of their lifespan, whereas someone who spent two years obese and then lost the weight and kept it off can only be recruited for that 2 year window, or 2.5%. There are probably other factors that come into play that bias the sample even further.
The question these studies answer is "given a random obese person, how likely is this person to lose weight?" This is a relevant clinical question, and the answer is usually a pretty low percentage. For an individual who hasn't struggled with obesity their entire life, a more pertinent question is "given that I have just become obese, how likely am I to lose the weight again and keep it off?" The chances of that are much higher.
[0] By BMI, which has a pretty big margin for error, but I was visibly overweight.
Did you grow up obese though? I think the statistic suggests there is something to having the body grow under those conditions.
I was athletic growing up and I’ll always have that experience and know how it feels. Someone obese at 18 has no reference point and neither do any of their body systems.
While I wasn't obese, I was overweight until the end of high school. For some reason I thought weight = 10*age and it took me a while to realize that this would be unsustainable past 20. Now I'd say I'm more fit than average (try to work out ≥4 times/week, have ran several half marathons and a marathon, decently adept at skateboarding) and people can't believe that photos of me as a child are the same person.
I'd say this is more of a boiling frog situation where I don't perceive a demarcation between life before and after getting fit.
No, but I'm trying to explain the sampling bias, not talking about growing up obese. If you randomly sample obese people at any age, 18 or 81, your sample will still be biased by years-spent-obese.
There probably is some effect from growing up obese, but the sampling bias is hugely relevant to interpreting the statistics, and it's not talked about much.
The way most studies of weight loss work is by recruiting a pool of obese applicants. This is intrinsically biased: someone who has had a lifelong struggle with obesity can be recruited across 100% of their lifespan, whereas someone who spent two years obese and then lost the weight and kept it off can only be recruited for that 2 year window, or 2.5%. There are probably other factors that come into play that bias the sample even further.
The question these studies answer is "given a random obese person, how likely is this person to lose weight?" This is a relevant clinical question, and the answer is usually a pretty low percentage. For an individual who hasn't struggled with obesity their entire life, a more pertinent question is "given that I have just become obese, how likely am I to lose the weight again and keep it off?" The chances of that are much higher.
[0] By BMI, which has a pretty big margin for error, but I was visibly overweight.