> Plus what rate of weight loss do you think is acceptable. Great question, I estimated the math before the last post but let me unpack it so people can correc

> Plus what rate of weight loss do you think is acceptable. Great question, I estimated the math before the last post but let me unpack it so people can correct me. If a man is avg US height of 5'9" with an obese BMI of 35 and weight of 240, then 0.5% to 2% each week would fit standard medical guidelines for effective dieting. At that weight you can easily fluctuate by 1% each day. So we have an eight week effect that is in total less than 1% over sham, a difference on par with standard daily noise and reasonable weekly goal. This is why there's a replication crisis in health research. Also, sham is a misleading control here if we're actually interested in weight loss. Why not control for any diet at all? Even use the same time each day going for a walk, or probably even meditating on weight loss strategies, at this improvement rate the advantage will melt away. Sham is defensible if you don't actually care about weight loss, but in that case weight shouldn't be your metric. Best case is it's a horribly misleading study design.