October 26, New York Times, Gina Kolata
For years, studies of obesity have found that soon after fat people lost weight, their metabolism slowed and they experienced hormonal changes that increased their appetites. Scientists hypothesized that these biological changes could explain why most obese dieters quickly gained back much of what they had so painfully lost.
But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and …

September 8, 2011, Los Angeles Times, Jeannine Stein
Medicare could save billions of dollars if people who were pre-diabetic or at risk for cardiovascular disease took part in community-based weight-loss programs, a study finds.
Researchers projected cost savings for the government healthcare program if millions of people in the U.S. age 60 to 64 participated in a program that helped them lose weight and gain more healthful lifestyle habits. They based their findings on an existing YMCA diabetes prevention program that is, as of this year, at 50 facilities in 24 states. …

August 30, 2011, Los Angeles Times, Jeanine Stein
Teens love text messages–and those texts may help them lose weight, if they’re done right. A study tested out various types of weight management-themed text messages on overweight teens to see what they liked, finding that they favored positive messages but disliked thoughtful questions.
Overweight and obese teens can be a tough crowd when it comes to weight-loss interventions–many have a tough time adopting more healthful diet and exercise routines. Researchers from the University of Michigan thought tailored text messages might be a good …

Medpage Today, John Gever, August 25, 2011
Common rules of thumb exaggerate how much weight people will lose from a given dietary calorie reduction, leading to unrealistic expectations and disappointment, researchers said.
Whereas patients are often told that cutting 500 calories a day will let them lose a pound a week, a more realistic formula is that such a caloric reduction would lead to a 50-pound loss over three or more years, according to Kevin D. Hall, PhD, of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., …

August 14, 2011, Weight loss surgery channel
Telling patients to use sheer willpower and make smarter food choices is not an effective means of treating obesity, according to a team of researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Rather, obesity counseling should focus on the brain’s tendency to fixate on high-sugar and high-fat foods, and address ways of avoiding environmental triggers.
“The brain is not really set up well to handle food in a way that would promote weight loss,” said clinical psychologist and obesity researcher Bradley Appelhans, Ph.D., lead author of …

August 13, 2011, AAP
SCIENTISTS have come up with a novel way of helping overweight people drop some kilos – retraining their taste buds.
Australian researchers have found that overweight and obese people who regularly tuck into fatty foods are less able to taste fat.
As fat promotes fullness, if a person is insensitive to fat their body will not send out signals telling them they are full and need to stop eating.
However the researchers found that switching to a low fat diet made people more sensitive to tasting fat, increasing their ability …

Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2011, Jeanine Stein
Obese men who want to improve their sexual health might have another solution besides their erectile dysfunction drugs. A study finds that overweight men who lost just 5% of their weight over eight weeks saw improvements in erectile dysfunction, sexual desire and urinary tract symptoms.
The small study focused on 31 obese men with a body mass index of 30 or greater and who had Type 2 diabetes. Some were put on a low-calorie diet that included liquid meal replacements and others were assigned …

August 3, 2011, Reuters/Tribune
Dieting to lose weight may not help older overweight adults live any longer, suggests a new study.
But dropping a few pounds on purpose also does not seem to cause any harm to the elderly — which had been a concern raised by previous studies, researchers wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
“There is a general sense in geriatrics…that weight-loss is a bad thing,” said study author Stephen Kritchevsky, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Improvements in diet and weight loss in the overweight …

August 2, 2011, TIME, Meredith Melnick
Lose weight. That’s often the first advice from doctors to their pre-diabetic patients. But while losing excess fat can help reverse Type 2 diabetes risk factors like insulin resistance and high blood-sugar levels, a new study finds that increasing muscle mass may also help lower risk of the metabolic disease.
According to lead researcher, Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, this may be good news for many people with pre-diabetes — a condition that results in higher-than-normal blood sugar, but does not qualify as diabetes — who have difficulty …

July 31, News-Medical, Ananya Mandal
According to obesity expert and University of Melbourne professor of medicine Joseph Proietto the high failure rate of weight-loss programs could be explained by growing evidence that an obese person’s body is programmed to regain any weight that is lost. He said that authorities are wasting money on campaigns urging people to exercise and eat healthy food since obesity is “physiologically defended”.
He wrote in an opinion piece in The Medical Journal of Australia in which he said weight loss in obese people only led to changes …