Weight Loss

As people gain weight, their blood pressure tends to go up. Fortunately, as they lose weight, their blood pressure tends to go down -- but only so far, says Dr. Karol Watson, co-director of preventive cardiology and director of the hypertension clinic at UCLA. "If your body weight is normal, getting below doesn't help," she says. Even modest weight loss (say, 5% to 10% of your current heft) is effective at lowering blood pressure for those who have high blood pressure or prehypertension.

Diets work. Even some of the most cockamamie diets work if you follow them. But as many serial dieters know, the trick is keeping the weight off after the wedding, or the high school reunion, or the motivating look in the dressing room mirror. I know - I really know - how hard it is to maintain weight loss. I've lost maybe 500 pounds in my lifetime. So I knew enough to be skeptical when I saw Jackie Warner's book "10 Pounds in 10 Days. " Of course, I didn't let that stop me. The diet industry exists because we fail, often again and again, at the hard work of a lifelong healthful diet and activity plan.

With two-thirds of U.S. adults overweight, it's not rocket science to conclude that we don't have a clue about how much to eat. But now there's a countertop gadget that looks a little like a kid's cooking set - perhaps not for nothing - that is meant to help with portion control. It's called Lifesize and was created by Myles Berkowitz, who'd had it with being overweight, and trainer Stephen Kates, who says, "You have to eat less food - that's the whole secret. " "Don't change what you eat; change how much you eat" sums up the idea behind Lifesize, a set of plastic measuring vessels marked for meats, toppings, saucy dishes and other categories of food.

In a head-to-head contest pitting a pair of psychologist-led "behavioral weight loss" programs against a 48-week membership to Weight Watchers, a new study found that subjects participating in the ubiquitous commercial program stuck with their regimen longer and shed more pounds. Compared with people who met regularly with a professional counselor, those assigned to Weight Watchers were more likely to lose at least 10% of their body weight by the 48-week mark. On this measure, Weight Watchers also bested a hybrid program that researchers had expected to be the most effective - a 12-week introductory course led by a clinical psychologist to jump-start subjects' weight loss, followed by 36 weeks of Weight Watchers.

Some new research tried to figure out what might help post-menopausal women achieve long-term weight loss. And it turns out that adding produce to their diet didn't show up as especially helpful in the short term, but in the long term it mattered. The researchers didn't find that eating fried chicken was just fine as long as it came with a side of broccoli. What they found was that some behaviors are hard to maintain forever, and adding produce might be easier than avoiding all fried foods for the long haul.

A Van Nuys company that sells pills that it claims make dieters "dream away" unwanted pounds while sleeping agreed Wednesday to halt sales in California and pay a $162,500 penalty to settle a false advertising suit filed by Ventura County. In a consent decree in which they admitted no wrongdoing, officials of the Nutri-Marketing Co. promised not to sell or advertise their product in California.

To the rational mind, the notion of willingly depriving oneself of food for days on end seems illogical, at best. Basic biology, after all, dictates that calories are necessary to sustain everyday functioning and that low levels of, say, iron or potassium could throw off our physical health, possibly even dangerously so. And yet, extreme dietary cleanses seem to have gripped the imaginations of even the most practical among us. Somewhere along the...

After all those well-intentioned New Year's resolutions have yielded to the force of habit, many of the nation's 79 million obese adults will have a day of reckoning with their primary care physicians. Lose weight and get active, the doctor will order, or risk developing diabetes. Then the MD will scribble a prescription. For most patients, the prescribed treatment will not be a pill. It will be a 12-week program aimed at preventing Type 2 diabetes by getting obese adults to shed as little as 10 pounds and exercise for a little more than 20 minutes a day. That regimen -- the Diabetes Prevention Program -- may soon become the blockbuster prescription medicine you've never heard of. In 2013, it is poised to become the envy of pharmaceutical companies, a new rival to programs such as Weight Watchers, and a target of opportunity for healthcare entrepreneurs.

The country is down to onededicated, prescription obesity medication -- the not-too-pleasantXenical -- since Friday's announcement that Meridiawill be removed from the market due to an increased risk ofheart problems among people with cardiovascular disease. But, notto fear, the major gathering of experts on obesity are gatheringSaturday through Tuesday in San Diego for the  Obesity 2010 meeting . Theschedule looks packed with promising ideas aimed at reducing thegirth of Americans although, I must say, I don't see any easyfixes.

Searching for a shortcut to weight loss? If so, you're part of a long tradition. For at least 100 years, people have been wearing full-body rubber suits in hopes of melting away pounds. The idea is simple: Heat up your body, and you'll supposedly burn fat. In these ab-conscious times, perhaps it's only natural that you can now buy weight-loss wraps specifically for your midsection. The best-known option is the Belly Burner, a snug neoprene band invented by celebrity trainer Bobby Waldron.