Retraining yourself to resist hunger cues and junk food while being active could result in more enduring weight loss than being active on a diet, a new study in the US shows. Meanwhile, people of all sizes eat more than they admit, as much as an extra three McDonald’s cheeseburgers (900 calories) a day, research in the UK finds.
These peer-reviewed studies were small, but they flag major issues for people wanting to maintain or lose weight: how to control eating behaviour and tolerate cravings, and the need to be more aware of food intake.
Moreover, the “Regulation of Cues” study targeting appetite mechanisms in people who were “highly responsive to food” and cravings was a randomised control trial, the most rigorous type of scientific research.
First author of this study Prof Kerri Boutelle, from the University of California San Diego, said: “There are individuals who are very food cue responsive (for hereditary, individual or environmental reasons). That is, they cannot resist food and/or cannot stop thinking about food.
Obese and thin people all fib about food to the same amount.
— Prof Gavin Sandercock, University of Essex
“Behavioural weight loss skills are not sufficient for these individuals, so we designed an alternative approach to address this clinical need ... If they feel they have trouble resisting eating, or if they never feel full.”
This “new alternative weight-loss intervention” led to more weight lost and greater success keeping it off than people on a conventional diet, the results published online in JAMA Network Open showed.
The 271 volunteers, aged from 18 to 65, who participated in the PACIFIC (Providing Adult Collaborative Interventions for Ideal Changes) randomised clinical trial were divided into four groups: the regulation-of-cues group who were not on a diet, a behavioural weight loss programme (diet) group, a group that combined both interventions, and a control group which had nutrition and social support and mindfulness training.
All of them were asked to do at least 150 minutes of moderate or vigorous physical activity per week.
The cues intervention focused on training around “natural cues of when to eat rather than focusing on calories and reinforced tolerance of cravings”.
It also trained people to resist “palatable”, that is, junk food (high amounts of sugar or fat with the additional of salt and flavourings), which stimulate the brain’s reward system and make these options difficult to ignore.
People in the cues group and the behavioural weight loss programme had similar weight loss, but the other groups “regained weight mid-treatment when clinic visits were reduced to monthly” unlike the cues group.
Losing weight can be simpler than keeping it off, prior studies have shown, and obesity is a huge health problem worldwide and in SA.
Meanwhile, research in the UK, involving 221 participants with an average age of 54, has found that people typically underreport what they eat.
3 – McDonald’s Cheeseburgers
5 – Pints of lager
7 – Packets of ready salted crisps
18 – Apples
300 – Cherry tomatoes
— 900 calories equals
“Obese and thin people all fib about food to the same amount regardless of the number on the bathroom scale,” the research team from the University of Essex reported in the American Journal of Human Biology last week.
What people reported and actually ate were significantly different, they discovered after testing the urine of the participants and using radioactive water to measure how much energy they consumed.
The researchers calculated the amount of energy a person burns in a day during everyday activities (this is higher among obese people).
Study leader Prof Gavin Sandercock said: “The idea that obese people lie about their food intake is wrong — it’s simply that as energy requirements increase with a larger body size there is more error between what people report and what they actually eat.
“Bigger bodies need more energy every hour of the day and particularly during physical activity because moving your weight is hard work.”
In SA, a recent national survey found that obesity is increasing, notably among women 45 to 55 years old but also among preschoolers and teens.
Hypertension is another health risk among South Africans, with an estimated one in three adults having high blood pressure — which is responsible for half the strokes and two out of five heart attacks.
Eating healthily and being active reduce the risk of hypertension, as does eating less salt. Now a new study suggests that an “taste adaptation intervention” can train you to enjoy a salt-restricted diet more.
“One of the major barriers to sticking to a low-salt diet is that people do not like the taste, but few studies have addressed this issue,” said US author Prof Misook Chung.
He said of their pilot study, presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress this week: “It shows in patients with high blood pressure that it is possible to change taste perception and learn to like food with less salt.”
The key to healthier eating, it seems, is to trick or retrain our brain into better eating behaviours and being more mindful.
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