“Biggest Losers” or “Longest Sustainers” ?
Anyone who’s ever bought a lottery ticket or played a slot machine knows how powerful a motivator money can be. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that well-designed monetary prods can spur weight loss, too. The basic premise of the study is this: The government should put monetary incentives where fat people otherwise put their food.
For-profit weight loss isn’t anything new. Paid spokescelebrities have been doing this for decades in the promotion of diet plans and pills. NBC’s “The Biggest Loser”, which just crowned its sixth season winner, is perhaps the best example of the extreme and often dangerous lengths people will go to for a $250k cash prize and national notoriety. Remember season one winner Ryan Benson, who lost 122 pounds in just 12 weeks? After the show’s end, he fully admitted to losing the weight by drinking mostly lemon water spiked with cayenne pepper, fasting for days on end, and exercising like a rubber suit-wearing Richard Simmons on crack. By the end of the competition, he was severely dehydrated and was peeing blood. In the five days after the show’s end, he gained 32 pounds in just water weight alone. And he didn’t stop there; his current weight is now comparable to his pre-show weight. Other past contestants say they have to exercise four hours a day, six days a week just to maintain the weight loss incurred in the show’s total-exercise-immersion environment. And to give you an idea of just how truly drastic the Biggest Losers’ results are: This season’s winner, Michelle, lost 110 pounds in just four seven months. During my year’s bout with anorexia, I lost just 65 pounds more than her and my behaviors and attendant weight loss qualified me as mentally ill.
Multiple studies have shown that it’s not extra weight so much that contributes to health problems as it is the vicious cycles of yo-yo dieting that’s to blame. In other words, it’s better to be consistently fat than to be fat, thin, fat again, thinner, fat once more, thinner again, ad nauseum. Government reviews of weight loss studies put the failure rate of diets between 90 and 95 percent, with most dieters regaining not only the weight they lost but more within five years. The health risks of yo-yo dieting are well established, with other studies confirming that dieting, ironically, tends to make fat people even fatter. Don’t get me wrong: Lasting weight loss is entirely possible in people who are at higher-than-healthy-weights for them; I’ve personally maintained a more than 100 pound loss in a healthy and non-dieting way for five years now. But those select few who do succeed in sustaining a weight loss for any length of time will be the first to tell you that they do not diet and that it’s generally more difficult to sustain a weight loss than it is to lose the weight. (The latter is not as difficult for me because the lifestyle changes I adopted that aid in my weight management are as much spiritual and ethical in nature as they are for health.)
So, here’s what I propose: Instead of paying those “biggest losers,” let’s instead pay those “longest sustainers.” Or, here’s another novel idea: Instead of providing financial incentives for people to lose weight, let’s instead use those federal funds to subsidize fresh fruits and vegetables, so that people of all socio-economic levels will have more of an “incentive” to eat healthier foods.
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