People who pile on the pounds very rarely lose them again, British researchers have found.

Just one in every 210 obese men and one in 124 obese women actually manage to achieve a healthy body weight, according to a decade-long study.

The findings are a stark warning of the lasting consequences of putting on weight, experts said tonight.

Study author Dr Alison Fildes, of King’s College London, said: ‘Once an adult becomes obese, it is very unlikely that they will return to a healthy body weight.

‘New approaches are urgently needed to deal with this issue.’

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Fat for life: Just one in every 210 obese men and one in 124 obese women actually manage to achieve a healthy body weight, according to a decade-long study

Her team tracked the fluctuating weight of nearly 280,000 British men and women between 2004 and 2014.

The results, published in the American Journal of Public Health, suggest that even when someone does manage to shed weight, they are very unlikely to keep it off.

A third of the patients they tracked displayed yo-yo weight cycles, losing the pounds only to put them back on again.

For those people who achieved a 5 per cent weight loss, 53 per cent regained this weight within two years and 78 percent had regained the weight within five years.

The researchers found that men who are obese - categorised as those with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 to 35 - had a 0.47 per cent chance of achieving a healthy weight, a BMI of below 25.

Obese women had a 0.8 per cent chance of dropping to a normal weight.

Those who were even fatter have a much slimmer chance of losing the pounds, the researchers found.

Men who were severely obese, with a BMI of 40 and above, had just a 0.08 per cent chance of achieving a healthy weight - just one in 1,290.

And only one on 677 severely obese women - 0.15 per cent - were likely to drop to a normal size.

Dr Fildes said current public health strategies are dismally failing to address the problem.

Yo-yo diet: A third of the patients tracked in the study lost weight - only to put it back on again

More than 74 per cent of men and 64 per cent of women in the UK will be overweight or obese by 2030, according to the World Health Organisation.

The problem is already resulting in soaring rates of type 2 diabetes and is predicted to have a similar impact on the numbers of people with heart disease, strokes and cancer.

Dr Fildes added: ‘These findings highlight how difficult it is for people with obesity to achieve and maintain even small amounts of weight loss.

‘The main treatment options offered to obese patients in the UK are weight management programmes accessed via their GP.

‘This evidence suggests the current system is not working for the vast majority of obese patients.

'Priority needs to be placed on preventing weight gain in the first place.’

Fellow researcher Professor Martin Gulliford said: ‘Current strategies to tackle obesity, which mainly focus on cutting calories and boosting physical activity, are failing to help the majority of obese patients to shed weight and maintain that weight loss.

'The greatest opportunity for stemming the current obesity epidemic is in wider-reaching public health policies to prevent obesity in the population.’

Tam Fry, spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, said: ‘The authors are quite correct in their conclusions.

‘It is the devil’s own job to get the obese person down to size and maintain it unless he or she has a personal point to prove.

‘There are examples, therefore, of women shedding stones because they are getting married and fear disgrace when walking up the aisle.

‘The likelihood is, however that once hitched they will put their weight back on.

‘A multi-million dieting business exists due to obese people yo-yoing from one diet to another in the hope that such-and-such a regimen will do the trick.

‘It very rarely does.

‘Prevention is key. It has been for years, with messages aimed at people not to get fat in the first place - but an increasing number don’t listen. The result is that obesity may break the NHS.’