Reader Question: What is Relapsing Remitting Obesity

This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing!

I received this question from reader Jeremy: “I’m in healthcare and I was recently in a training that was talking about O-word as a chronic disease (eye-roll) and then they used the term lifelong relapsing remitting obesity but didn’t elaborate what it meant, can you help?”

Thanks for asking Jeremy. This is a term that I’ve seen crop up in a lot of work that is funded/conducted/promoted by the diet industry, from studies, to guidelines, to marketing and promos, to Continuing Medical Education.

”Relapsing Remitting” is a term for a medical condition whose symptoms go through cycles of being more and less severe (for example, relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.) “Relapsing/remitting ob*sity” then, just means that if people repeatedly attempt weight loss, they will repeatedly lose weight short term and then gain it back long-term.

This experience is certainly not news since it’s what research has shown us for about a hundred years for behavioral interventions and since the advent of weight loss drugs. And it already has a name – weight cycling.

Not only does it have a name, but research shows that it can create serious harm and, in fact, may be responsible for the negative health outcomes that get blamed on body size.

So why the re-brand? Let’s say you’re the weight loss industry, or one of the people who shill for them. You are fully aware that your recommendation that people keep trying your interventions/drugs for life will lead them to weight cycle, and that weight cycling is linked to harm, and people are becoming aware of this. Obviously, you have a problem.

Now, you could just be honest and ethical and admit that you have no ability to create significant long-term weight loss for more than a tiny fraction of people and that simply existing in a higher-weight body doesn’t constitute a disease diagnosis anyway. But remember, you’re the weight loss industry, so being honest and ethical is an idea you abandoned a long time ago.

So what you need is a marketing solution to a medical problem – enter “relapsing/remitting ob*sity.”

First, you claim, without evidence or logic, that simply existing in a higher-weight body is a disease (regardless of actual health, symptomology, or cardiometabolic profile).

Then you claim that your newly minted “disease” (of simply existing while fat*,) is relapsing-remitting.

If you can convince people of this, then you don’t actually need a product that delivers significant, long-term weight loss (which is great for you, since you absolutely do not have one!) Instead, your existing failed products and interventions (you know, the ones that create weight cycling) have been rebranded into successful products, and higher-weight people will be told that they should spend their time, energy, and money weight cycling for the rest of their lives (either ignoring the health issues that are posed by weight cycling or, if you can manage it, blaming those health issues on higher-weight bodies.)

The only people who benefit from this are the weight loss industry.

That’s why we cannot just go along with this. We have to notice it and we have to point it out. So when you see someone refer to “relapsing remitting ob*sity” it’s a sign that you are being lied to, either by the weight loss industry that is profiting from this ridiculous sham, or by someone who is well-meaning but has been duped by the weight loss industry.

Either way, when you see someone refer to ”relapsing-remitting ob*sity,” you could ask “How is that different from weight cycling?” (Pro tip - it’s not.) Or you could ask “Don’t you mean weight cycling?” (Because that’s exactly what they mean.)

To paraphrase Shakespeare: A failed weight loss intervention by any other name would still be as harmful.

Did you find this post helpful? You can subscribe for free to get future posts delivered direct to your inbox, or choose a paid subscription to support the newsletter (and the work that goes into it!) and get special benefits! Click the Subscribe button below for details:

Liked the piece? Share the piece!

More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.