The Weight Loss Prescription Has a Gap
The standard advice given to women with PCOS goes like this: lose 5 to 10 percent of your body weight and your symptoms will improve. That figure comes from real research. A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Legro and colleagues showed that weight reduction improved ovulation rates in women with PCOS. Clinicians ran with it. What got left out of the conversation was that a significant proportion of women in that and subsequent studies did not see cycle restoration even after sustained weight loss, and that roughly 20 percent of women diagnosed with PCOS are not overweight at all.
