How Much Weight Loss Is Needed To Actually Help Knee Arthritis Pain?

In this video, I’m going to tell you exactly how much weight loss is needed to help knee arthritis pain. Now I’ll be discussing results from a research study that was done very well regarding knee arthritis pain and weight loss. It connects the two. But there are some problems. And I’ll be diving deep into this specifically, towards the end of this video.

I’m going to be talking about what if you don’t have weight to lose or what if you’ve already lost weight, and you’re still having knee arthritis problems, what then? Now the study that I’m going to tell you about is called I’m going to read it here is there a dose response relationship between weight loss and symptom improvement in persons with knee arthritis.

This is a study published in 2016. And it was done in Australia, where they took 1383 people, and they put them through an 18 Week Weight Loss Program, where they modify their diet and exercise, they were exercising three times a week. And each six weeks, during that 18-week period, there was three phases that they went through, they just went through a slightly different change that kind of a more intense diet and exercise.

And I won’t go into the details, you can actually find a link to this study down in the description below if you want to dive into the research, but I’m going to just give you a bird’s eye view of what this study found. Now on average, the people were 64 years old. They varied in age, but generally they were in their 60s, and on average, they weighed 95.1 kilograms, which is about 209 pounds.

They started out with baseline measurements, and one of the measurements they took was a knee arthritis questionnaire. This is a questionnaire that took about 10 minutes to fill out. And it had over 40 questions that covered five different areas they looked at regarding knee arthritis, the first section was pain. The second section was function in daily living.

The third section was symptoms. The fourth section was functioning in sports. And the fifth section was quality of life, the scores from this questionnaire were converted using an algorithm to a zero to 100 point score. And zero means they had extremely pain, extreme knee problems, their quality of life was terrible, high pain, all of that stuff. And then 100 meant that they were really great, their knees felt fantastic, no problems whatsoever. And now obviously, what they found is as they lost weight, all the scores went up on their questionnaire, so all their scores improved, meaning their knee pain got better and better.

And there was a correlation between more weight lost meant more improvements across the board. So how much weight exactly did they lose, so that you can have an idea of how much weight you might need to lose to achieve some improvements in your knee arthritis? Well as a group, the over 1000 people that were in the study after the 18 week period, they lost an average of 7.9 kilograms, which translates to about 17.4 pounds.

So if you go month by month, you’re looking at about a four pound loss more or less, that this is what they went through to get the improvements that they showed now of that group of 1383 people, they split them into five groups of weight loss. So the first group had a 2.5% reduction in body weight or less, the next group was 2.5% to 5% body weight reduction, then we had 5% to 7.5%, then we had 7.5% to 10% body weight loss.

And then the final group that lost the most weight loss 10% or more of their body weight. That means that on the lower end, the people that were in the 2.5% body weight loss group, they lost an average of 2.8 pounds, or about 1.3 kilograms. And in the high end, they lost 27 pounds, or 9.48 kilograms over the 18 week period, of course, and going back to those five sections that they looked at the pain, the function and daily living the symptoms from their knee, arthritis, their function in sports, and their quality, quality of life, all of those sections improved more, the more weight that they lost.

So each group that had more weight loss showed bigger changes improvements in their scores when it came to knee arthritis. Now this is great news, especially if you have weight to lose, then beginning to lose weight can definitely make an improvement in your knee arthritis. And we know this, this is kind of common sense.

Generally, the more weight you lose and there’s less pressure going through your knees and so it should theoretically make your knee arthritis feel better. But I get patients in my clinic all the time that manage their weight very well and don’t have much weight to lose and still suffer from the arthritis. And I’ve got the other end of it to where it’s somebody who was overweight, did a good job losing weight and their knee arthritis did improve, but they’re still dealing with problems from the arthritis.

What then what if you don’t have any weight? Left To Lose, or the weightlifter loses just tiny but your arthritis problems are still big, they’re still limiting you and your ability to exercise. The pain is still bothering you at night, you might be happy that is better. But what else could you work on to further improve your knee arthritis? Well, there’s five factors that I look at with my patients. One of those is weight. And it’s really not the biggest factor that I pay attention to.

The second one is inflammatory diet foods. So if you have a diet that has a lot of inflammatory foods, there’s a higher chance that it’s going to affect your joints, where you have joint inflammation or arthritis. That’s the definition of arthritis, joint inflammation, there’s three other sections that need to be looked at.

The third one is overall strength. In other words, how much strength do you have on your body, especially in your lower half in your low back, your core, your hips, your thighs, your calves, even your foot muscles need to be factored in. Because the overall strength does directly influence how much pressure goes through your knee joints, which influences knee arthritis, fourth is activity.

And you can think of this in extremes, like if you’re very inactive, or you’re sedentary, that’s a problem that can influence knee arthritis, for sure we know about this. And then on the other extreme of activity, you can be way too active, or do exercises that are too impactful like running jumping activities, that create too much pressure to the knee joints as well.

And another version of that is if you’re doing the right impact for your knees, like what your knees can tolerate safely. But you’re doing it for too long for too much time, that can negatively impact your knees. And that’s how activity fits in there. And the fifth piece that is rarely ever looked at is muscle imbalances in the healthcare field.

Hardly anyone looks at this, that to my knowledge people like myself, I’m a manual physical therapist, that’s my specialty. That’s the only specialty that I know of that ever talks about muscle imbalances, when it comes to knee arthritis. And maybe I’m biased. And I preach a lot about muscle imbalances here on this channel. I’ll give you that for sure.

But I have tons of patients that get better when we look at and address the muscle imbalance problem. And to put it really simply, if there’s certain muscles that influence the need to put pressure on the knee joint, if those muscles are over dominant, they’re very strong, and they don’t quiet down because there’s ways to make them quiet down, then at rest, without even doing any activity, the force is going through your knee joints are going to be increased. And then even when you go do activity, even if it’s good activity for you.

Because that muscles already too strong and dominant, it’s going to over compress your knee joints and cause problems. This is why exercises are recommended that are supposed to be good for knee arthritis, yet they can still aggravate knee arthritis problem. So I drew a picture to help get the point across about what I’m talking about.

Now regarding weight. Here’s a chart. So this is a pie graph on this side, showing an overweight individual with their problems in the arthritis are related to if you think of their problem as being this whole pie chart, so 100% of their problem. Half of it might be related to weight and inflammatory foods. So I split this up on this side, because that’s what you’re eating.

That’s what goes in your mouth. And then on this side in the red is your strength, your activity and the muscle imbalance problem. If you have a lot of weight to lose, then a bigger chunk of your problem is going to be related to the weight problem and what you eat and how the inflammatory foods might affect your joints. It will still be important for you to pay attention to the strength, the activity and the muscle imbalance. And you can still make an improvement in your knee arthritis situation.

Even if you don’t lose any weight. We see that here all the time. We have patients that are obese, some morbidly obese, and I do tell them, Look, you got to lose some weight, you got to eat better, that’s a given. Although I’m not a specialist in that I’m not here to help you out with that. But when it comes to strength, activity, muscle imbalances, you’re in the right place, you’re talking to the right person.

And if you can improve that, you can begin to make this side of your problems smaller, so that you can then know to focus on this part of your problem. And overall your knee arthritis should improve. And if you’re an appropriate weight individual, and you don’t really have much weight to lose, I’m being I’m being conservative here because I’m saying that maybe you still do have some weight to lose. And maybe you do eat inflammatory foods.

Maybe you’re one of those people that can eat whatever they want. And they just luckily don’t put on much weights. You still need to look at what you eat because it can affect your knee joints. But it’s going to be a better investment of your time and effort to focus on this big 75% chunk over here, where you need to look at your strength overall, your activity and your muscle imbalance because you might be very thin and not heavy, because you don’t have much muscle, that could be part of the problem.

And then you might be fitting in not overweight, because you’re very active, you do a lot, but you’re doing too much, and that’s aggravating your problem. Or maybe you’re doing the right activity, you have decent strength, but your muscles are severely imbalanced. And that’s causing way too much pressure to go through your knee joints. And that’s what’s continually aggravating your knee joints. All that needs to be addressed and looked at.

And you cannot neglect the red side over here. That has to be looked at. Because you can’t just focus on weight. I’m not saying weight is not important, it definitely is important to look at the study that I just talked about demonstrates directly how the more weight you lose, the better you’re going to feel. But the people’s scores never got to 100%. They never did.

They were in the 50s range. So that tells me that these individuals these over 1000 people in Australia that went through this study still had knee arthritis problems, they just got better, which is excellent. But there’s more to look at. That might be the case for you. You might even need to be looking at your muscle imbalances, your strength and how you’re doing your activity. Exactly. Now, as I said earlier, I am not a specialist in weight loss.

There are many different people many different places to look for people that can help you out with weight loss and inflammatory foods, that kind of thing. What I am good at is talking about the activities that you do, how to move and the muscle imbalances. I preach heavily about muscle imbalances on this channel.

I’ve got a ton of videos to help people with knee arthritis problems and they’re all linked down in the description below in a playlist. And then you also need to learn about our knee arthritis recovery program. You’ll find the link for that down in the description as well hope this video was helpful for you. If you have any comments or questions, drop them below. We’d love to see those. We’ll get back to them as fast as we can. And I hope to see you in the next video. Bye