I'd like to thank The New York Times for contributing to the malaise and hopelessness currently coupled with obesity.
Why? Because last Monday the Times published After The Biggest Loser, Their Bodies Fought to Regain the Weight. A depressing account of what happens to contestants after they leave the show, it is. But good journalism? It is not.
Sadly, this newest article adds to the disagreeable and outdated health advice from the Times, or those found in an Op-Ed. And full disclosure, I'm far from impartial as The Biggest Loser is among my most hated shows on television. Yet I'm also a religious watcher of The Bachelor, so hey, nobody's perfect.
I don't believe the Times had malicious intent, nor were they purposely trying to paint sustained weight loss as some Sisyphean task. Instead, my main gripe was that they didn't add anything to the conversation and they failed to propose any solutions. We've known from study after study that losing weight is the "easy" part, maintaining is the hardest. And the only answers they did provide were bariatric surgery or accepting hunger as the new normal.
The logic and skepticism of our inner scientist should be wary of accepting the conclusions of a small, self-selected study, but it's hard to overlook such a compelling story. So in an effort to steer the interwebz back to reality, below are 5 ways in which the article failed to cover the entire story:
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