Weight Maven

Ragen Chastain of Dances With Fat posted about this recent study showing a link between healthy habits and “a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.”

Color me surprised … not.

I’ve long been frustrated by weight loss researchers trying to make lemonade out of lemons and pointing to the improvements in health markers despite the fact that people lost very little of their excess weight during the study period. Hint: it’s probably not the weight loss that benefits your health, it’s the behaviors that caused the weight loss. It’s essentially the reverse of something Taubes has said that I agree with: “what makes you fat makes you sick.”

So it annoys me no end to see big organizations, like Weight Watchers or even the NIH, proclaim the usefulness of losing a little bit of weight.

No. What’s useful is practicing healthy behaviors!

Back to the study. Researchers looked at the link between four healthy behaviors and mortality in NHANES III. The behaviors examined included:

• exercising regularly,
• eating a diet high in fruits and vegetables,
• avoiding or quitting smoking,
• and consuming alcohol in moderation

The graph below shows the mortality risk ratio for differing BMI ranges and number of healthy behaviors.

Here’s Ragen’s take:

As you can see on the chart, being “normal weight” is an advantage if you do not partake in any of the four habits. However, even one healthy habit cuts the risk down by about half, and subjects who did those four things and were obese have basically the same outcome as “normal weight” people who did all four habits, and a dramatically lower risk than thin people who didn’t participate in the four habits.

As she also points out, the study is far from perfect. But it does jive quite nicely with other reports that suggest that healthy behaviors improve health (including the supposed ability for weight loss surgery to reverse diabetes).

I think David Kessler has it spot on: the problem isn’t weight, the problem is food. Oh, and let’s not forget weight stigma.

Weight loss and the holy grail

All of this said, I am still pursuing weight loss. But what I like about this perspective in the context of weight loss is that it lessens the importance of the number on the scale as an indicator of health and more on things that are actually under our control.

Another plus, it also allows for more flexibility in life (aka Yoni Freedhoff’s “live the life you’ll enjoy, not the one you’ll tolerate”).

I happen to believe that what will make me healthy will make me a lower weight. Will I get to some artificially low BMI and fit into single-digit sized clothes? I’m betting not. But stay tuned … the saga will continue ;).