A new study in the American Journal of Public Health validates what many dieters conclude:  keeping weight off is hard.  For people with a Body Mass Index of 30, the study found getting to a normal weight was very low probability, according to a report in CBS News.

The study took 30,000 randomly sampled patients of each gender from the UK Clinical Practice Research Database who had 3 or more BMI records, in each of 6 different categories — normal weight (18.5 – 24.9), overweight (25.0 – 29.9), obese (30.0 to 34.9), severely obese (35.0 to 35.9), morbidly obese (40.0 to 44.9), and over 45 (superobesity — a category with a total population of under 30000 in each gender), and examined their history between late 2004 and late last year.  The study excluded those who had bariatric surgery. With increased BMI, the change the subjects ever reached normal weight declined. The morbidly obese had a success rate of only 1 in 677 women and 1 in 1,290 men.

There were certainly successes in weight loss: 1 in 12 men and 1 in 10 women managed — at one point — to lose 5 percent of their body weight, by 78% of those people put the weight back on within the subsequent five years.  The overall probability of achieving normal weight was 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women.

“The thing that I was discouraged about was that individuals had a hard time even maintaining that 5 percent weight loss. And the reason for this is, that’s a recommendation that I often give to individuals because it’s achievable,” Lisa Cimperman, a clinical dietitian at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, is quoted by CBS News in response to the study.

The paper called for greater research into public policy health policies as a way to address the problem, but did not analyze how much existing public policy efforts contributed to the problem.

Lead researcher Alison Fildes told Healthday, “”What our findings suggest is that current strategies used to tackle obesity are not helping the majority of obese patients to lose weight and maintain that weight loss…This might be because people are unable to access weight-loss interventions or because the interventions being offered are ineffective — or both.”