AP, Mike Stobbe, June 1, 2010
How much money would it take to get you to lose some serious weight? $100? $500?
Many employers are betting they can find your price. At least a third of U.S. companies offer financial incentives, or are planning to introduce them, to get their employees to lose weight or get healthier in other ways.
“There’s been an explosion of interest in this,” said Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Incentives.
Take OhioHealth, a hospital chain whose workforce is mostly overweight. The company …

Rachael Rettner, Yahoo news, March 24, 2010
Moderate exercise helps middle-aged women avoid putting on the pounds, but only if they are already a normal weight, a new study suggests. Women who are overweight or obese do not appear to reap the same benefits in terms of weight-gain prevention, the researchers say.
Weight-loss programs can help people shed the pounds, but many people have trouble keeping it off. The new results could help women figure out how much exercise is sufficient to keep from tipping the scales again.
“The weight creeps back on …

The New York Times, ABBY ELLIN
October 21, 2009
COOKIES? On a diet? Apparently so.
Just ask Christina Kane, who has tried everything from the grapefruit diet to Atkins, with no success. Then she heard about Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, which involves eating six prepackaged cookies a day, plus one ‘real’ meal — say, skinless chicken and steamed vegetables.
“I thought, ‘That diet looks so incredibly easy,’ ” said Ms. Kane, 43, a legal secretary in Washington, who started paying $56 a week for the prepackaged cookies in June, when she weighed 255 pounds. Three …

For people who are trying to lose weight, it does not matter if they are counting carbohydrates, protein or fat. All that matters is that they are counting something. That is the finding of the largest-ever controlled study of weight-loss methods published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. More than 800 overweight adults in Boston and Baton Rouge, La., were assigned to one of four diets that reduced calories through different combinations of fat, carbohydrates and protein. Each plan cut about 750 calories from a participant’s normaldiet, but no one ate fewer than 1,200 …