Overweight Willing to Risk Death to Get Slim

How desperate are overweight people to shed their extra pounds?

Desperate enough that they are willing to risk death. And so desperate that they value losing weight as much as severely depressed patients value relief from their illness, a new survey has found.

The survey, by Dr. Christina C. Wee, an internist at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues involved 366 patients who were part of a large medical practice based at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A third of the participants were overweight and 27 percent were obese.

The researchers asked people to imagine a treatment that would guarantee them an effortless weight loss of varying amounts. For each amount, they were asked, would they be willing to accept a risk of death to achieve it? If so, how much of a risk of death?

The fatter the person, the more he or she would risk death to lose weight. And the more weight the patient imagined he could lose, the greater the risk he would take to achieve it.

Nineteen percent of overweight and 33 percent of obese people would risk death for even a modest 10 percent weight loss. In contrast, 4 percent of normal weight people would risk death to lose 10 percent of their weight.

Many of the overweight and obese participants also said they would give up some of their remaining years of life if they could live those years weighing slightly less. Thirty-one percent of obese patients and 8.3 percent of overweight patients said they would trade up to 5 percent of their remaining lives to be 10 percent thinner.

The survey was published in the December issue of The Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Wee said doctors did not always appreciate how desperately many people longed to be thin.

She said she was taken aback by the findings because patients in the study also reported it would take a lot more than a 10 percent weight loss for them to reach their dream weights. Yet it seemed that almost any weight loss, even 10 percent, was something they longed for.

“That was very surprising to me,” Wee said in a telephone interview.

In fact, obesity researchers say, it takes only a modest weight loss — 5 to 10 percent — to improve health.

Wee said she advised patients to make small changes with which they could stick. Although she is not overweight, she said she recently switched from regular sodas to diet ones and effortlessly lost 5 pounds.

The fatter the person, the more he or she would risk death to lose weight. And the more weight the patient imagined he could lose, the greater the risk he would take to achieve it.