the Price of Weight Loss Programs

It was a introductory meeting at a local affiliate of a nation-wide weight-loss chain.

First meeting is free, and thereafter meetings cost $12 per week. Go as often as you like.

They also sell low calorie, low fat packaged meals to go with their meetings, and sell their branding on other companies' products. They also offer an online diet and exercise tracking widget for a $30 sign up fee and the first month's use and $17 per month thereafter, with discounts for months bought all at the same time.

I got dragged to a meeting with a friend of mine when I hinted I was thinking about losing some weight.

Although it was geared toward women, the meeting was kind of goofy. It was an introductory meeting, so a fair bit of time was spent on explaining their food accounting system, which is just a complicated way of counting calories, fat, and fiber. They also pushed their meal plans heavily, but I'd gotten bored by then and had stopped paying attention.

Regular meetings, as least what I glimpsed through an open doorway at a meeting in progress, seemed more like the AA meetings I've seen in the movies. Not so much the pushing of the diet food, but That's not really good, by the way, reinforcing a "special" group as a provider of forgiveness and social validation seems like they turned weight loss into a religious activity.

And worst of all, they don't make a distinction between muscle and fat when they say "lose weight." They only seem to care that the pounds come off, not where they come from. Losing too much muscle mass is a lot of times what kills chemo and AIDS patients who are responding well to treatment.

Maybe it's a plan for people who like keeping track of a lot of details and don't want to eat regular food or cook too much for themselves. It's certainly not for me.

A lot of weight-loss programs rely on pre-packaged food. Not necessarily of their own making, but they require you to have access to nutritional data for the food, which generally isn't listed on things like apples, or fresh chicken breast, or heads of dark green leafy lettuce. You know, things your mother and grandmother told you were good for you (not to mention today's nutrition researchers). What they're saying, in essence, is that if you eat healthy, you can't be healthy, so you have to eat unhealthy to be healthy. Which makes no sense.

The funniest thing is that every weight loss program has the same long term success rate at 5%, which is the same as if you were dieting on your own.