When people try to lose weight.....
Nov. 23rd, 2013 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovI've been hanging around in the fat acceptance community for a while, and there's a strong consensus there that trying to lose weight is a pretty reliable method of making your life worse, with many anecdotes (read the comments-- and they don't even include the stories about eating disorders which started with diets) and some science. On the other hand, for the world in general, mentions of efforts at losing weight get a lot of encouragement and stories about weight loss which improved health and quality of life.
This is a rather striking mismatch. Even better, I've asked at scholarly fat acceptance group about whether there are studies which look at weight loss efforts for the whole population-- how many people have tried what, and what the outcomes have been-- and I haven't gotten any answers. There are studies looking at the results of particular diets, but that's a different question. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it's at least possible that the study I want hasn't been done.
So, I'm going to try some completely informal, unscientific, non-ethics-checked questions to an audience which hasn't been randomly selected. If you've tried to lose weight/fat, what methods have you used? How has it worked out? On the whole, would you say your life is better, worse, or about the same as the result of what you've done to lose weight?
This is a rather striking mismatch. Even better, I've asked at scholarly fat acceptance group about whether there are studies which look at weight loss efforts for the whole population-- how many people have tried what, and what the outcomes have been-- and I haven't gotten any answers. There are studies looking at the results of particular diets, but that's a different question. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it's at least possible that the study I want hasn't been done.
So, I'm going to try some completely informal, unscientific, non-ethics-checked questions to an audience which hasn't been randomly selected. If you've tried to lose weight/fat, what methods have you used? How has it worked out? On the whole, would you say your life is better, worse, or about the same as the result of what you've done to lose weight?
