Weight Loss

Following the Weight Watchers program for a year helped people lose twice as much weight as following doctor's weight loss orders in a randomized trial, researchers reported Thursday in the journal The Lancet. Primary care physicians in Australia, Germany and the U.K. recruited 772 overweight and obese adults.  About half were assigned to 12 months of care from a doctor, according to their country's national treatment standards.  The other 377 got a free yearlong membership to Weight Watchers.   Over the course of the year, researchers took measurements of the patients' weight, fat mass, waist circumference and blood pressure.  Ultimately, 61% of the Weight Watchers group completed the 12 months; 54% of other doctor-treated groups did.  The researchers compared the patients' weight loss using several different methods.  On average, weight loss for the Weight Watchers members was 11.16 pounds, versus 4.96 pounds for the patients receiving standard care.

After first being turned down by the Food and Drug Administration, makers of the investigational weight-loss drug Qnexa have promising new data to report and will ask less of the FDA this time around. Vivus, Inc, of Mountain View, Calif., sought FDA approval last year to market Qnexa for weight loss in adults. But the request was denied with the FDA citing a potential side effect in women who become pregnant while taking the medication. Qnexa is a combination of two existing drugs -- the stimulant phentermine and the anti-seizure drug topiramate.

Cathy entered the weight-loss program at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School with a warm personality, an infectious smile and a great desire to be thin. My colleagues and I were beginning to experiment with a very low-calorie diet at our clinic, a fast combined with nutrition supplements that was designed to get rid of a lot of weight very quickly. The diet had just 420 calories per day. Cathy did well on it initially, dropping from 230 to 193 pounds. Then she stopped losing weight.

Weight-loss programs offering support via telephone and the Web work about as well as in-person counseling to help obese people lose weight, a study has found. Two intervention programs were compared with a control group in the two-year study released today in the New England Journal of Medicine , in which 415 obese men and women participated. They were randomly placed in a weight-loss program that offered support remotely, via the Web, telephone and email; in a two-year program that included in-person support in addition to the remote support; or in a control group that encouraged independent weight loss.

Dieters may want to forget episodes of falling off the wagon, but researchers say an attentive memory for what is eaten could help people eat less at their next meals. So sitting at a movie with a bucket of popcorn holding perhaps a day's worth of calories might be a bad idea for the present and the future, the research in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests. In an analysis of 24 studies , the researchers found that while distractions can lead to increased eating, that distraction is even more influential on later eating.

For those of you struggling with your weight, here's a future transplant list you will want to be on: Receive some brown fat from a lean, healthy donor, have it injected in or around your belly fat, and quickly see your metabolic function improve, your white-fat deposits make way for lean muscle and your scale show a downward trend. That tantalizing prospect for fighting fat took a small step closer to reality Monday with the publication of a study that found that, in chubby mice, at least, such as procedure worked.

The FDA has told the makers of the proposed weight-loss drug Lorcaserin that it will not at this time approve the marketing of  the medication, citing concerns about its marginal effectiveness and about cancers that occurred at higher-than-usual rates during clinical trials. The FDA's decision comes just two weeks after the makers of the prescription diet-pill Meridia pulled it from the U.S. and Canadian markets at the request of the FDA. It is the first signal of how the U.S. drug agency will deliberate on a trio of new weight-loss drugs proposed for the U.S. market, where about one in three adults are obese.

Losing weight might not only help your waistline, but just maybe your memory too. A new, small study would seem to suggest that obese patients who have their fat surgically removed show improvements in memory and concentration when compared to obese people who didn't have surgery. Researchers from Kent State University in Ohio gave a cognitive and memory test to 150 obese patients in New York and North Dakota. The tasks involved navigating through computer mazes and recalling word lists and as many animal names as possible in 60 seconds.

A pair of landmark studies demonstrated that weight-loss surgery may be the best solution for Type 2 diabetics with poor control over their blood sugar. So, now what? Experts say that diabetes care is likely to undergo a profound shift. But before diabetics get in line for space on the operating table, a lot of questions need to be answered. Not least of those, say clinicians, is who will do those operations, how well and for how much. Bariatric surgery has exploded in recent years, and with that growth have come concerns about quality of care and patient safety.

Older women who want to lose weight - or keep off the weight they've lost - should faithfully keep a log of everything they eat, avoid restaurants at lunchtime and not skip meals, researchers say in a study out Friday - results that echo the message that awareness is one key to a healthful weight. The research from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle also found that the women who skipped meals lost almost eight fewer pounds over a year than the women who did not. This is research anyone can try replicating for themselves: Write down what you eat every day and see whether you lose weight.