Well-designed, diet-based strategies have been shown to lead to rapid and substantial weight loss and get patients to maintain a 12kg to 15kg weight loss for periods of a year and sustain it beyond, the doctors said, citing studies in the UK over the past five years.
Most Indians with diabetes are likely to have BMI above 23 or so. They would probably be better with BMI of about 20 - that means losing eight to 10 kilograms, permanently," said Lean who is set to start a study involving Indian-origin and Pakistani-origin people in the UK.
However, maintaining the loss of even 10kg may pose a challenge to most patients. "The human brain is programmed to eat more - people tend to eat beyond their hunger levels. It is difficult for people to stick to low calorie diet for long periods of time and this makes most people to regain the lost weight within years," said Satinath Mukhopadhyay, an endocrinologist at the Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research, Calcutta.
