National Weight Control Registry

[S Bear]

I've only seen a few mentions of the National Weight Control Registry (http://www.nwcr.ws/)(NWCR) on this site (some from maxlharris), so I thought I might bring the issue up front.

The NWCR was established to gather facts about people who lost weight and kept it off. According the NWCR,

The National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), established in 1994 by
Rena Wing, Ph.D. (http://nwcr.ws/people/Rena.htm)from Brown Medical School, and James O. Hill, Ph.D. (http://www.nwcr.ws/people/Hill.htm)from the University of Colorado, is the largest prospective investigation of long-term successful weight loss maintenance. Given the prevailing belief that few individuals succeed at long-term weight loss, the NWCR was developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss. The NWCR is tracking over 5,000 individuals who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off for long periods of time. Detailed questionnaires and annual follow-up surveys are used to examine the behavioral and psychological characteristics of weight maintainers, as well as the strategies they use to maintaining their weight losses.

This strikes me as a very valuable effort, and even though it is not a statitistical sample--the people in the Registry have self-selected themselves for inclusion--it has already resulted in a large number of scientific papers.

I'd urge any PP/low-carbers who qualify to join (http://www.nwcr.ws/NWCR_join.htm)(you need to have lost 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year), as this is one way of getting the scientific community to take PP/low carb as seriously as it deserves. At present, it appears low-carbers are underrepresented in the Registry:


There is variety in how NWCR members keep the weight off. Most report continuing to maintain a low calorie, low fat diet and doing high levels of activity.


78% eat breakfast every day.
75% weigh them self at least once a week
62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week.
90% exercise, on average, about 1 hour per day.
"Most" people in the registry seem to have arrived at their target weights through low-fat dieting according to the statement above; but most of the people I know who have lost weight and kept it off have done so through low-carb eating.

I'd urge folks from this forum who qualify to stand up and be counted.

I'll join the registry myself...but I'm not elegible until next February!

[laughingW]

Pretend you are eligible, and check out the questions. It is a badly constructed questionnaire and so the results will be skewed. Many low carb techniques are not even a possible choice in the ways people lose weight and keep it off.

The papers based on it have not acknowledged the weaknesses in the instrument, as far as I know.

Sorry.

[maxlharris]

I know I brought it up.

Ammy is actually a participant.

I qualify (having maintained a minimum of 32 lbs off since Thanksgiving of 2006), but I have not joined.

Self selection is the least of their problems, methodology wise. Pick your number for LT diet success, 1-5% of people who start will reach a goal and maintain for a year or more. You can ask the 1-5% what they did (which is what NWCR does), but you are not really learning anything. The key is the contrast between what the successful people are doing and what the rest of people are doing. Without the 95-99% who don't lose and maintain, you don't know if breakfast is actually useful or not.

FWIW: This is why I chuckle at anyone who has a Steven Covey book. You can't just ask highly effective people what makes them highly effective, without talking to some ineffective people and expect anything really useful.

[laughingW]

Ha ha, I have Steven Covey books and I can tell you the difference between effective and not effective, just in my own history. ;)

[maxlharris]

I'm not saying that Covey's work is useless. I am saying, from a statistical/scientific point of view, he cannot say what he says with any certainty, which is how he presents it.

On NWCR, it fails (my test) because these may be the habits of the folks who lost and maintained, but there is no effort made by NWCR to see if they are the exclusive habits of those folks.

FWIW, I am eligible to be a NWCR "winner", and I eat breakfast 5-7 days a week, and weigh just about every day. I am sure I watch more than 10 hours of TV and I know that I haven't gotten an hour a day of exercise really ever. Course, I exercise smarter than your average low fat dieter, but I've maintained the last year with almost no exercise. And I have a desk job where I talk on the phone and sit at a computer for 7-8 hours a day. I suspect that the exercise and the TV have not much to do with it (assuming you are eating correctly, which means with adequate fats and proteins).

[Ammy]

Pretend you are eligible, and check out the questions. It is a badly constructed questionnaire and so the results will be skewed. Many low carb techniques are not even a possible choice in the ways people lose weight and keep it off.

I'm not sure I agree with that statement. It's been awhile since I've been "survey'ed", but I remember thinking that on the in initial survey I was happy that I was able to state my low carb eating options. That those types of responses WERE an option.

[Ammy]

If those of us that are eligible do not sign up, then how are we spreading the word that eating Low Carb worked for us??

[maxlharris]

NWCR has adopted the question set to be more accommodating to non-low-cal/low fat diets. 3-5 years ago, it had a lot of questions on how severely you limited your calories and your fats.

I'm not sure why I am interested in "spreading the word." More honestly, I don't know that I am interested. If I don't like the methodology, I'm not sure why I should contribute.

[Ammy]

It's really not a lot of work, and if you don't contribute, then you're just helping them spread the word that the low fat/calorie way of eating is the way to go...
Because the people that eat that way are taking the surveys of the NWCR.

It's just one more way of spreading the word to the person out there that doesn't really know, understand, or want to acknowledge carb-addiction.

[deirdra]

Do they still require confirmation of weights/dates from a US doctor to participate?

[Ammy]

Nope.
My dr doesn't even know I'm part of the registry.

[S Bear]

Well, if nothing else, maxl has put out a great idea for a book: Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Weight Losers.

It ought to be pretty easy to find people to survey; there seem to be a lot more of them.

[maxlharris]

Amusing.

The thing isn't about successful or unsuccessful. It's that you have to look at BOTH in order to see what differentiates them. If you I were writing a book with a big study of how people lose weight, you could start with the NCWR research, then ask the same question to people who lost and didn't maintain, and people who tried to lose and never did. Would not be able to find participants for either group.

Give them the same survey, and figure out what they are all doing (IE: low fat/low cal diet) and what the "winners" are doing that the rest of the folks are not (IE: eating breakfast).

*sigh* I'm done explaining why I don't like NWCR.

[S Bear]

Give them the same survey, and figure out what they are all doing (IE: low fat/low cal diet) and what the "winners" are doing that the rest of the folks are not (IE: eating breakfast).

*sigh* I'm done explaining why I don't like NWCR.

Yeah, I understand the issues of research design you're talking about. And medical and nutritional research is plagued with crappy research design--and, worse, poorly framed questions from the outset.

I'm a physicist. I don't consider most of the stuff published in medicine and nutrition to be science at all. But it seems to be what drives public policy. And in some cases, poor public policy has a direct impact on my own life and health. For example, when a cholesterol test comes back "high" according to the new NCEP standards, my HMO makes all of its doctors hand out a sheet encouraging us to follow a low-fat, high carb diet, and also requires the doctors to recommend that we immediately begin taking statins. (My doctor was happy enough about it when I said "no.")

Most of the people I've known who lost weight and kept it off did so on some version of a low-carb diet. Would it make me happy if the NWCR reflected that fact? You bet.