Yahoo's Year in Review Finds "Weight Loss" to be the Number Two Most Searched

Yahoo did a countdown of their top ten searches for 2010 and the number two search was “how to lose weight”. This of course is not uncommon and things like “a fool-proof weight-loss scheme”, “how to lose weight fast”, and “lose weight fast” are all things that are constantly being searched, but in actuality there is no full-proof plan to make weight just fall off. A University of Melbourne study claimed, "surprisingly, and against current beliefs, that a fast drop is better than a slow one” -- at least when it comes to motivation, not for keeping the weight off.

One of the reasons that this is the one thing that is searched so much is because obesity levels are up 12 percent in searches up from last year. More than 72 million of American adults (26.7 percent) are obese. Statistics also tell us that one in six adults that lose weight will keep it off, what that means to us is that five in six of them will gain it all back. These are not the things we want to hear to motivate us.

The article I came across on yahoo talks about all of these things and if you would like to read it all more in more depth feel free to do so. I’ll link it later in today’s post. I realize that this is a very common thing and that even though American’s are constantly obsessed with the way that we look we are also very contradictory because we also seem to have a problem with super sizing everything and not fully comprehending the process that less is more.

One really interesting thing that I found in this article is that for the one in six that are successful it helps if the individual is female, single, diabetic, healthier overall, young and college-educated. This sparked interest in me for a couple of reasons. One thing the article says is that if one of these factors is off then the level of success is lowered and that makes sense. One of the things that stood out to me is that the article said diabetic and healthy overall. I personally do not think that being diabetic makes one “healthy overall” so to me it was a walking contradiction in its own.

The article goes on to talk about the importance of keeping a food diary, which is true. It also talks about how people search things like celebrity weight loss such as Kelly Osbourne, Kim Kardashian, and even Bill Clinton who apparently slimmed down for a wedding or something that he was a part of. Another thing brought up is the HCG diet and how this fad was searched much more than things that previously had been like the South Beach diet, Atkins, Acai Berry, cabbage soup diet and things like that which had been ranked highest in the past.

So basically in review of this article we find that as Americans we ourselves are a contradiction. We want things, but don’t want to work for them because we believe that there should be shortcuts to everything. This in itself should be motivation for all of us that what we really need is to believe in ourselves and get this stuff done. If you want to read the article you can find it at http://yearinreview.yahoo.com/2010/us_burning_questions#2how-to-lose-weight. If you have anything you’d like to add please feel free to do so. In the meantime I am going to pack up my stuff and start my Christmas break for the semester.