#edit: k i fucked up i included a slur i didnt catch it until rereading my post half hour later my bad i removed it

[a-curious-little-thing]

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night (???) @worth-beyond-a-number-scale !

Genuine question. Not a callout post, or anything negative, I am literally just... genuinely curious and want to ask, but it's been two months of me trying to figure out how I'm even gonna go about this without coming across as rude so I'm just gonna try giving it a go now and hope for the best.

In this post, you said that "95% of all weight loss attempts fail, which is an actual statistic from decades of studies and not an exaggeration." I did some looking, found the site you were quoting from a different post and read it. The site you linked specifically was just one paragraph from a longer article, so I read that too. They all mention the 95% thing.

But then I visit this website (yes, I know it has nutrition in the name, I didn't realize that until just now, I'm sorry if that was a poor move on my part!) which states:

I included the "there are some people who believe that intentional weight loss is not only... [rest of it]" bit because from how you talk about it, when i read that part it really did feel like something similar to what you've said before.

Again, i cannot stress enough just how much I'm not trying to be confrontational, or call you out, or just anything like I'm implying you're wrong. I really don't want to argue. I just want to know why you hold the opinion you do, and to understand it and evaluate my own opinion and see if I need to reflect.

I tried writing a draft to this like two months ago, and I read the New York Times article then, but when I tried reading it just now it said that I need to pay a subscription. By frantically refreshing the page and highlighting as much text as possible and hitting ctrl+c, I was able to copy the entire article into my google docs! (i'm only including this bit because imo this is really the only important part of the article, the rest is just diet stuff related... :/

The whole article does do a lot of framing weight-loss as the goal of everything, which does admittedly drag my point down a bit. (I would've personally preferred a much more neutral telling, imo) But, my point is, Dr. Stunkard has stated he no longer supports his study, though it has become so widespread at this point a lot of people treat it as fact.

You also say that there's been years of research behind the 95% study, but I will be honest. I couldn't find them. It could've been that I just wasn't using the right keywords, or I skimmed them by accident, or my inability to find the right articles when doing research has struck once again, but either way I couldn't find anything besides a handful of articles supporting this study and the rest quoting this NY article.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I'm confused. I don't want to seem like I'm publicly calling you out or I'm accusing you of lying or anything like that. But I don't know how else to get your attention (asks closed, you said you haven't really been looking at your messages, reblogging your posts would just... get very cluttery after a certain point) and doing this seems like it'll be my best chance. I've also been mulling over this in my head since December and it's starting to bother me. Even if you could just link me more articles that support your opinion and have verifiable research behind them besides Dr. Stunkard's study (what i mean is, any other study about this that wasnt done by him) that would be great, and if I'm still confused then I'll ask more questions. Politely. If you're alright with that.

I don't know how to end this post. I hope your day has been well? I hope I didn't say anything rude or offensive, if I did please correct me. Have a good day/night.