The Myth of Kick-Starting Weight Loss - Part 2

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In part 1 we talked about the long-standing, evidence-free phenomenon of “jump-starting” weight loss using some kind of short-term extreme food/caloric restriction. Today we have another version. I saw this on a friend’s Facebook and got permission to share it anonymously. She saw it in her doctor’s office and snapped a picture:

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While none of these are extreme, they all share something with the examples from Part 1: they have no basis in evidence and there is no reason to believe that they will lead to long-term significant weight loss (though they might increase your aluminum foil budget…) But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To me they all sounded like 1985 called and wants its useless weight loss advice back, but I decided to do my best to find research to back up these claims. (As always, I don’t link to research that contains weight stigma, but I give enough information so that you can google it.)

Serve food restaurant- not family – style. Portion food onto plates and serve from the stove or counter

I found this study that pretty much found the opposite:
“An Exploration of How Family Dinners Are Served and How Service Style Is Associated With Dietary and Weight Outcomes in Children” Loth et al.

The study included children ages 8-12. Their conclusion was “Although plated meal service may seem like a desirable strategy for ensuring that children eat a healthier diet, the current results did not provide support for this association. Evidence was found to support the use of family-style meal service to promote the use of responsive feeding.”

In the end, I couldn’t find any research to suggest that this will lead to significant, long-term weight loss.

Rely on aluminum foil. Wrapping leftovers in foil rather than clear plastic makes them less appealing.

Before I do a bunch of google searches with bonkers terms like “leftovers aluminum foil weight loss” that are going to get me added to weird mailing lists, can someone please tell me why we are trying to make making leftovers less appealing? Eating leftovers (if you’re a leftover fan) means getting to eat yummy food again instead of throwing it out after it becomes a sentient science project wrapped in foil at the back of the fridge. That seems like a good, or at least not a bad, thing to me. Was this tip written by Big Tinfoil? Alright, Google time.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t find any research supporting this as a way to jump-start weight loss and certainly not as a way to create significant, long-term weight loss.

Rearrange food in your cupboards and fridge so the items you see first are the healthiest option.

There were some studies that suggested that if you put fruits and vegetables in more prominent positions (and, interestingly, if you think about how tasty they are, rather than how “healthy”) you are likely to eat more. But, it should be obvious, eating vegetables (or “healthy food” by any definition, is not the same thing as losing weight. There are fat people who already eat the “healthiest option” by whatever definition someone is using and there are thin people who don’t. And that’s completely fine, I’m not here for food moralizing. I am here for pointing out that suggesting that eating “healthier food” as a weight loss tip is based in a weight-stigma driven stereotype about how and what fat people eat. Not cool.

Use 10-inch dishes and tall glasses to reduce portions automatically.

The evidence on this is mixed, but it seems like the evidence suggesting that this will work is pretty low-quality. I found this from 2019 “Plate size and food consumption: a pre-registered experimental study in a general population sample” Kosite et al.

Conclusion:

“This study suggests that previous meta-analyses of a low-quality body of evidence may have considerably overestimated the effects of plate size on consumption. However, the possibility of a clinically significant effect – in either direction – cannot be excluded. Well-conducted trials of tableware size in real-world field settings are now needed to determine whether changing the size of tableware has potential to contribute to efforts to reduce consumption at population-level.”

The good folks over at BioMed Center, did exactly that kind of trial (trigger warning on the link and the indented quote below for weight loss and calorie talk.) They found:

“on average, participants ate 19 calories less from the smaller plate; this difference is only around 1% of the recommended daily energy intake for the average adult and represents a very small difference in consumption. Therefore, our study does not provide any clear evidence that plate size affects how much is consumed. Smaller plates might not help us to eat any less, or at least not a meaningful reduction.”

So I didn’t find any evidence to support the claim that any of these ideas will lead to significant, long-term weight loss. What I did find was decades of articles recycling these tired tropes without citing any evidence, most of which rely on stereotypes about how much and/or what kind of food fat people eat (despite the fact that there are fat and thin people who eat exactly the same way.)

Sometimes they were a listicle published at New Years, sometimes they were accompanied by quotes from someone who runs a fancy lab at a university. Nonsense like this gets repeated and reiterated and soon no research is “necessary” because it’s reached “everybody knows” status. Before you know it, it’s on a big screen at some doctor’s office where people in the waiting room assume (with good reason) that it must be evidence-based or it wouldn’t be, you know, on a big screen at their doctor’s office.

In the best case scenario these “tips”  will do nothing to impact weight. But worse, they could actually “kick-start”  weight cycling (losing weight and regaining it) which is linked to many health issues including most of the health issues that get blamed on being higher-weight and increased overall mortality.

As always, if someone tells you that they can help you to lose weight, ask them how much and for how long, and then ask them to show you the research backing the claim.

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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.