Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift
By L. Bacon, L. Aphramor. Nutrix Journal, 2011
708 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Current guidelines recommend that "overweight" and "obese" individuals lose weight through engaging in lifestyle modification involving diet, exercise and other behavior change. This approach reliably induces short term weight loss, but the majority of individuals are unable to maintain weight loss over the long term and do not achieve the putative benefits of improved morbidity and mortality. Concern has arisen that this weight focus is not only ineffective at producing thinner, healthier bodies, but may also have unintended consequences, contributing to food and body preoccupation, repeated cycles of weight loss and regain, distraction from other personal health goals and wider health determinants, reduced self-esteem, eating disorders, other health decrement, and weight stigmatization and discrimination. This concern has drawn increased attention to the ethical implications of recommending treatment that may be ineffective or damaging. A growing trans-disciplinary movement called Health at Every Size (HAES) challenges the value of promoting weight loss and dieting behavior and argues for a shift in focus to weight-neutral outcomes. Randomized controlled clinical trials indicate that a HAES approach is associated with statistically and clinically relevant improvements in physiological measures (e.g., blood pressure, blood lipids), health behaviors (e.g., eating and activity habits, dietary quality), and psychosocial outcomes (such as self-esteem and body image), and that HAES achieves these health outcomes more successfully than weight loss treatment and without the contraindications associated with a weight focus. This paper evaluates the evidence and rationale that justifies shifting the health care paradigm from a conventional weight focus to HAES.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Pharmacy, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92988be4ac3f5cfa8ef5e8fd8593b323f153a3b4
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Citations in the corpus
- Intuitive Eating (2020, background): “HAES focuses on health and adaptation, in contrast to weight maintenance or loss of body weight, and supports the dependency on internal processes of regulation of hunger and satiety (Bacon & Aphramor, 2011).”
- Effective behaviour change techniques for physical activity and healthy eating in overweight and obese adults; systematic review and meta-regression analyses (2017, background): “Moreover, weight neutral interventions that encourage body acceptance, combined with healthy behaviour and wellbeing, can improve health without targeting weight loss [2].”