Fooducate did a little summarizing of a study that recently came out regarding the “weight loss industry” that I think was a little interesting. Apparently, selling us on every method – except the sensible one – to lose weight is big business:
1. Consumers spent $61 BILLION to trim down last year. that’s $200 for every man woman and child in this country!
2. If you consider that “only” 75 million Americans are trying to lose weight, that’s $800 per person per year! 3. $3 billion were spent on weight loss chains such as Weight Watchers.
4. Diet pills and meal replacement solutions are a $3 billion market too!
5. Diet food home delivery services such as NutriSystem are a comparably “small” market, just under $1 billion.
6. 80% of dieters try to do so by themselves instead of joining a group or seeing a registered dietitian.
7. The typical Dieter makes 4 attempts per year to try and lose weight. Which means at least 3 fail.
8. Fads are a big part of the diet industry. This year’s hot trends include the Dukan Diet and the 17-Day Diet.
I’m kind of, just… do you know what I could do with $800 dollars? Shoot, do you know what I could do with $200?!
While you’re playin’, give me a cold hard twenty and watch me do my thing!
It makes a lot of sense, though – if you don’t know or understand whatever weight problem you might be experiencing, you’re going to seek out the “popular” resources, the “long-standing” resources and the stuff that everyone tells you that you need to do in order to be successful. I get it.
But at the same time, if the typical dieter tries, four times a year, to diet and at least three of those attempts fail… not only is that demoralizing, it’s also a little dangerous.
It just makes me sad… not in a “pity” sense, but in a “sympathize” sense. I remember living off of tea for 11 days straight – not the master cleanse… just regular tea bag tea – and I lost 14lbs. I gained that weight back so damn fast that I didn’t even get to enjoy the fact that it was gone. I lost the weight, but since you can’t live on tea forever… I was going to gain it back. SuperCoolFoodDeliveryService can’t deliver my food to me forever.
The point I’m trying to make is… for the average person, I don’t believe that most of the stuff this $61 billion is being spent on is actually sustainable. Particularly in the diet realm.
Am I alone in this? Thoughts?