Health, appearance concerns common motivators for weight-loss maintenance
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
In a cohort of weight-loss maintainers, participants were often motivated by health and appearance concerns, and demonstrated improvements in these and other domains resulting from weight-loss efforts, recent research suggested.
“Weight-loss maintainers described obesity-related memories, health and appearance concerns as motivating both the initiation and sustainment of long-term weight loss,” Suzanne Phelan, PhD, professor in the department of kinesiology and public health at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and colleagues wrote.
Phelan and colleagues sought to determine major themes of a large cohort experiencing long-term weight-loss maintenance. Participants answered open-ended questions about weight-loss triggers, current motivations, strategies and experiences.
The study included 6,139 WW International, Inc. (formerly Weight Watchers) members who maintained a weight loss of at least 9.1 kg for at least 1 year. Researchers employed machine learning and topic modeling to assess responses to six open-ended questions. Participants were recruited via an email sent by WW.
The researchers found that participants (94.3% white; 91.9% women; mean age, 53.6 years; mean BMI, 27.8 kg/m2) lost 24.5 kg and maintained the loss for 3.4 years. Factors that prompted successful weight loss, according to participant responses, clustered into five topics: medical status, appearance, mobility, social prompts and change needed. Furthermore, factors currently motivating weight loss produced two topics: looking back at experiences at higher weight, and health and appearance concerns.
Researchers identified two recommendations — perseverance in the face of setbacks and consistency in tracking — for success in weight-loss management. Among the reported rewards for weight-loss management were improved confidence, pain, mobility, fitness, body image, medical status and affect, whereas negative consequences included clothing costs, sagging skin and unexpected criticism from others.
“This topic analysis suggested that weight-loss maintainers in WW were commonly motivated by health and appearance concerns and that they experienced profound improvements in these and other domains as a result of weight-management efforts,” Phelan and colleagues wrote.
They added that future weight-maintenance research should include more diverse populations and investigate the importance of promoting perseverance in the face of setbacks, sustained tracking and making changes in medical status more salient during the weight-maintenance journey.
“Societal level interventions that confront a prevailing sociocultural climate in which weight-based self-esteem and discrimination persist are needed,” they wrote. “Although common themes emerged from the experiences of more than 6,000 weight-loss maintainers, unique pathways were also described in the lives of those engaged in the ongoing process of weight-loss maintenance.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts