3 ms·

You’re begging the question. You assert it’s not particularly rare for people to lose weight and keep it off long term, and therefore it’s trivially obvious to

You’re begging the question. You assert it’s not particularly rare for people to lose weight and keep it off long term, and therefore it’s trivially obvious to prove that it’s not particularly rare. Except that all studies to date show that it -is- rare, especially for the group of people that are candidates for an intensive intervention like medically managed weight reduction or bari surgery. The data show that over ten years average sustained weight loss in diet-and-lifestyle interventions is zero (actually, there’s usually weight gain). That doesn’t rule out particular rare exceptions, but they’re just that, and not useful for evaluating the intervention as a whole.

taneq 9y ago
That's not what 'begging the question' means. If you say "iron doesn't rust" and I show you a rusty piece of iron, that's not 'begging the question' regardless of how many studies you can cite that show iron not rusting under various conditions. And 'average sustained weight loss over a cohort' is the wrong measure, especially if your cohort are candidates for bariatric surgery (ie. pre-selected for being medically recognized as incapable of losing weight voluntarily) rather than just overweight people in general (a fair few of whom do choose do get back in shape.)