Correlates of Weight‐Loss Methods Among Young Adults in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of various weight-loss behaviors among young adults in Canada and differences in the use of these methods by demographic characteristics, health literacy, and perceived body size. METHODS: Data from the 2016 wave of the Canada Food Study were used, which collected self-reported information from 3,000 young adults in five cities. Linear regression models were conducted to investigate correlates of the number and type of weight-loss methods used across the following four categories: dietary changes, physical activity, assisted weight-loss methods, and unhealthy behaviors. RESULTS: In the past 12 months, more than half of respondents reported a weight-loss attempt, and nearly one-fifth engaged in an unhealthy weight-loss method. The risk of engaging in a greater number of weight-loss behaviors across categories was higher for women, nonbinary-gendered individuals, and individuals who perceived themselves as having overweight or obesity. Respondents with lower health literacy engaged in a significantly greater number of unhealthy methods. CONCLUSIONS: Many young adults use healthier weight-loss strategies, but a concerning number use multiple and/or unhealthy weight-loss methods as well. Furthermore, there are subgroup differences in weight-loss method engagement, which holds significance for public health efforts aiming to improve weight-related behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".