Research
Adherence
Maintaining weight loss after VLCD treatment is extremely difficult, with majority of patients regaining significant weight within 1-2 years, regardless of maintenance strategies.
Don't expect VLCD to be a permanent fix. Most people regain the weight within a year or two. To keep it off, you must use the refeeding period to learn behavioral strategies and nutrition education, as the diet itself does not teach long-term habits.
ModerateRefutesMEDIUM confidence
The major problem to be resolved is the maintenance of the large weight losses achieved with these diets... At 22 months follow-up, 56% of the patients... had regained more than half of their weight loss.
Why this rating
Based on follow-up data from major studies, but attrition and lack of long-term RCTs limit certainty.
Source
Very Low Calorie Diets: Their Efficacy, Safety, and Future
Thomas A. Wadden et al. · Annals of Internal Medicine · 1983
DOI 10.7326/0003-4819-99-5-675
narrative_review · n=10000Cited 264×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Very low calorie diets (VLCDs) providing less than 800 kcal/day produce rapid, large weight losses (average 20 kg in 12 weeks) in moderately to severely obese adults, significantly outperforming conventional behavioral or pharmacological treatments.Moderate
- VLCDs improve cardiovascular risk factors, including lowering blood pressure, serum cholesterol, and improving glucose control in type II diabetics, though HDL cholesterol may decrease in women.Moderate
Related findings · Adherence
- Regular physical activity (at least 150 minutes/week of moderate-intensity) reduces all-cause and cardiovascular mortality by 20-30% and lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes by 25-35%.Strong
- Increasing physical activity from a sedentary lifestyle to an active one in middle adulthood significantly reduces the risk of coronary events compared to remaining sedentary.Strong
- Resistance exercise is the only intervention capable of consistently restoring muscle function and strength in sarcopenia, partially overcoming age-related anabolic resistance.Strong
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