couple preparing foodAmerica’s cultural struggles against a collective bulging waistline may seem like old news. By now, many of us are all too familiar with the numbers: most American adults are overweight (63 percent), with a substantial minority being obese (32 percent) or extremely obese by CDC standards. What is new is that, as a society, there is greater acceptance today for being overweight than in the 1950s, when modern dieting culture began.

Consumers have come to accept their weight status, and being “heavy” is now the social norm; being overweight or even obese is much less stigmatized than in the past. This is a huge shift in self-awareness and in willingness to accept stigmatized terms like “obese” as personal labels. When individuals accept that they have a problem like “obesity,” it forms the platform for actual behavioral change.

With this rise in self-aware overweight and obese consumers, we have found the emergence of a new type of weight-manager consumer, one we call the "sophisticated weight manager."

Food and beverage marketers might want to get acquainted with this small group of consumers who primarily use tactics that are historically new to mainstream American food culture. We encountered these “sophisticated weight managers” (both overweight and obese) in our ongoing ethnographic research into obesity and weight management in America and found that they had transitioned to the kind of diet once associated with extreme protein-centered, low-carb crash diets from decades ago.

Who Are Sophisticated Weight Managers?

In 2004, when we conducted a deep study of obesity in America, we discovered that most obese Americans did not accept the term in relationship to themselves, only other people. Few overweight consumers seemed to have any real sense of the health consequences of having a high Body Mass Index. This was at the high point of the Atkins diet era, and our research helped highlight the notion that America had not yet overcome its approach to weight loss through crash dieting.

Today we encounter a very different cultural landscape. Weight management is increasingly not as much about short-term efforts as it is about permanent dietary alterations. Our Weight Management and Healthy Living 2015 report finds that within the over half of U.S. consumers (56 percent) who say they are trying to lose weight there are weight-management behaviors that are potential indicators of where weight-management culture is headed. This is why we believe it is critical to understand the subpopulation of sophisticated weight managers so that food and beverage stakeholders can have a more intimate, relevant conversation with the public needs and challenges tied to weight and eating practices.

We identify sophisticated weight managers as 14 percent of adults who are actively managing their weight and select primarily or exclusively emerging food and beverage tactics. Sophisticated weight managers can be found across the general population, but they:

  • Tend to be younger and live alone
  • Are more likely to be from an ethnic minority
  • Are more likely to shop at emerging channels that specialize in fresh, local and organic foods (Whole Foods Market 19% vs. 9%, farmers markets 17% vs. 8%)

The following chart illustrates the tactics sophisticated weight managers are employing that are historically new to mainstream American food culture.

examples of food & beverage tactics

As depicted in the above chart, today’s sophisticated weight managers are apt to:

  • Eat more foods with minimal processing and eliminate or minimize "bad" foods in their household
  • Eliminate or limit snacks, or at least try to eat nutritionally balanced snacks
  • Minimize carbohydrates and eat less meat and more vegetables
  • Increase “healthy” fats/oils and increase raw foods in diet
  • Follow a vegetarian or vegan, gluten-free or low-gluten, high-fiber or paleo diet
  • Drink protein shakes
  • Reduce or eliminate alcohol

In many ways, sophisticated weight managers represent the future of weight management, as they are learning these tactics at a young age and integrating them naturally into their everyday diets. These weight managers are more concerned with weight-related health issues than weight or BMI. Their “sophistication” lies in avoiding the concept of the short-term “diet” entirely in favor of a generalized approach to eating that incorporates emerging food and beverage tactics.

Sophisticated weight managers represent a likely future scenario for weight management in America:

  • Their approach focuses less on traditionally hard-to-implement approaches, such as portion control and calorie counting, and more on distancing themselves from the traditional American diet (which is high in fat, meat, sugar/refined processed carbohydrates and low in fiber).
  • Their lower-level concern about objective weight (or BMI) suggests an increasing tolerance of being overweight, which will continue to reduce interest in short-term crash dieting.
  • This group is more interested in being healthy from a “modern perspective”: eating fresh, less processed foods, aging better and avoiding chronic diet-related diseases.
  • To the extent that their approach catches on, it will slowly decrease the audience for traditional diet foods and diet products and encourage further declines in processed, “center-store” food and beverage volumes.

weight management 2015