The authors respond

The intention was to exclude only those who were appreciably disabled and unable to participate in the physical activity program. Indeed, we excluded only 37 of the 554 respondents to our advertisements. Thus we believe that our participant group was a reasonably unbiased group. We acknowledge that many earlier studies have been unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve long-term weight maintenance. We believe that we have demonstrated that a simple cost effective program utilizing frequent contact with a nurse can achieve just this. We believe that our findings apply to a fairly large number of overweight individuals, but made no claim for the suitability of our program for the morbidly obese.