It seems that the battle of the bulge is considered newsworthy more and more these days.  Yesterday, two interesting articles caught my eye.

The first was about a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reporting that the Atkins diet had resulted in the most weight loss in a study of 311 women who were assigned to read and follow one of four diet books that discusses Atkins, The Zone, The Ornish Diet or the US dietary guidelines.  After a year, Atkins follows lost about 10 pounds while the others lost between 3.5 and 6 pounds.  Of course, Drs. Barry Sears and Dean Ornish question the validity of the study, and there are a host of questions about what it means, but what's interesting to me is that the weight loss over a year is so small.  I mean, 10 pounds lost makes the news?  It seems I can gain and lose 10 pounds every month.  I wonder how the long term effectiveness of Medifast would hold up to this study.  Sure, the superstars lose 75, 100 or more in a year, but what about the rest of us.  Maybe I'll do some digging and find the average 1 year loss for Medifast and some competitors.  It's good to know what we can expect.

The second story is about a man that weighed over 1200 pounds.  No, that's not a typo.  One thousand, two hundred.  Ironically enough, the story reports that he followed a high protein Zone diet (the same one that resulted in a 3.5 pound loss in the first story) and he's down to 840 pounds and was able to leave the house for the first time in 5 years.  My wife's first reaction when I read to her that the man's mother and friends needed to feed and clean him since 2002 was, 'Why did they keep feeding him?'  While he has to eat, what my wife and I wonder is what they feed him?  He only started the diet in 2006.  So what did the do to him from 2002 to 2006?  In any event, it is a great accomplishment to shed nearly 400 pounds in a year, incredible, in fact.  I hope he stays on the road to success.