Will The Obese Become Thin? Fat Chance, Says Science

It's tough to get rid of your fat. Coming back to normal weight after becoming fat is just one in 210 for men and one in 124 for women over a year, says research in the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), according to bbc.

It is even tougher for the extremely obese to drop off their unwanted pounds every years, says a study of UK health records.

All strategies to do it fails, says research. A team in King's College, London, is asking for "wider-reaching public health policies" in order to prevent people from getting fat at all. Lead researcher Dr Alison Fildes noted that most of the options given to obese British people for the weight management programmes through their GP were just not working.

In the United States, about 35 percent of adults and 17 percent of children, which totaled upto more than 91 million people are fat, according to healthline.

"Treatment needs to focus on stopping people gaining more weight and maintaining even small levels of weight loss," she said. "Current strategies that focus on cutting calories and boosting physical activity aren't working for most patients to achieve weight loss and maintain that. The greatest opportunity for fighting the obesity epidemic might be in public health policies to prevent it in the first place at a population level."

After documenting the weight gain of 278,982 men and women between 2004 and 2014 with the help of electronic health records, and excluding those who had undergone "weight loss surgery", the team found that 1,283 men and 2,245 women could come back to their normal body weight.

Those whose Body Mass Index was 30 to 35, the yearly possibility of thinning down was just one in 210 for men and one in 124 for women. It shot up to one in 1,290 for men and one in 677 for women with "morbid obesity", that is, for those whose BMI was 40 to 45.

Moreover, the loss of 5% of body weight was at least higher---just one in 12 men and one in 10 women could maintain it annually, even though most of them got back the weight in just five years. Above a third of the men and women studied went though "cycles of weight loss and weight gain."

Co-researcher Prof Martin Gulliford of King's College London added that current plans to help the obese were just not working.

"The greatest opportunity for stemming the current obesity epidemic is in wider-reaching public health policies to prevent obesity in the population," he said.

The research is published in the American Journal of Public Health.