Americans are obsessed with weight loss, but you couldn’t tell by looking at us. Today, more than one-third of U.S. adults and nearly 20 percent of young people are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We’ve tried to buy our way out of the problem. In 1992, Americans purchased about $30 billion in diet programs and products according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Today, the diet and weight-loss industry rakes in over $60 billion a year, yet our obesity epidemic only continues to rise.
For all the time, money, and mental energy we throw at it, science shows that most dieting efforts are doomed to fail. A 2006 study from The New England Journal of Medicine found that most people in weight-loss programs “regain about one-third of the weight lost during the next year and are typically back to baseline in three to five years.”
