When patients come to see Dr. Christine Ren-Fielding, they almost always talk about their frustration at trying to lose weight on their own. Many people, even those who have faced the struggle themselves, feel as though they should be more successful at ‘dieting’. The frustration is increased by the message we often hear, that if people who are obese just ate less and exercised more, they would lose weight.

Anyone who has lost even 10 pounds with diet and exercise knows it is not easy. But to lose a substantial amount of weight – like 50 or 100 pounds – and keep it off, is many times harder. The difficulty with losing weight on your own is not in any way a personal failure, Dr. Ren-Fielding says. Instead, it is the reality of how our bodies work. Our bodies are not programmed to lose weight, so we have to fight against biological, metabolic, genetic, and lifestyle challenges. A systematic review and meta-analysis confirmed that self-guided weight loss is substantially difficult to succeed at. The analysis was published in the American Journal of Public Health.

23 randomized controlled trials were analyzed. These trials compared self-managed weight loss with each other, or with minimal controls in overweight and obese adults. Each study lasted a minimum of 6 months, and overall included almost 10,000 people. When looking at what success people found in self-managed weight loss, they only lost about 4.4 lbs more than the control group after 6 months. At 12 months, there was no significant weight loss between the groups. For someone hoping to lose 50 – 100+ pounds of weight on their own, these are discouraging statistics.

Dr. Ren-Fielding points out that there is vast difficulty in trying to lose weight on your own especially when you’re trying to lose a lot of weight. The lifestyle changes you make on your own can lead to substantial weight loss, but this is most often seen in the case of combining those changes with bariatric surgery. The surgical procedures Dr. Ren-Fielding offer are tools that work in conjunction with healthy eating and exercise to give patients the best chance of substantial and lasting success.