Tag: weight loss

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

Nutritionists have recently come to an exciting find in a new study on eating habits, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

According to the study’s findings, small rituals prior to meals could assist us in eating more consciously and with more discipline.

Comprised of six rounds of assessment on 1800 participants, the study was conducted by assistant professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Allen Ding Tian.

How closing your eyes and counting before meals may aid weight loss – Business Insider

Chew it over: a guide to eating slowly | Life and style | The Guardian

Chew your deep-dish filled-crust pizza slowly. Slurp your thickshake with care. Do not pour cooking oil down your neck to act as a slide for your next Cinnabon.

Eat slowly. Get thin. This is the promise underlined by researchers at Japan’s Kyushu University, who pored over the data of 60,000 Japanese health insurance claimants. Slow eaters were 42% less likely to be overweight or obese than fast eaters. Even normal-speed eaters had a 29% lower risk of being overweight.

“It’s all to do with the signal to the brain,” explains performance nutritionist Elly Rees. “Studies show that it takes up to 20 minutes for us to register that we’re full. So people who overeat tend to eat too quickly.”

That 20-minute gap can be vast. If people eat more slowly they “find that they’re actually full,” Rees says.

Chew it over: a guide to eating slowly | Life and style | The Guardian

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

The opening photo in Half, Julia Kozerski’s series of naked self-portraits, is actually the bookend to a sequence of earlier photos. In those, she appeared unhappily in her wedding dress in a changing room cubicle, more than 300lb (21 stone) and mortified. Here, she appears in the dress again, standing sideways on to the camera, to show how much of the dress is unoccupied. Over the course of a year, Kozerski lost half her body weight, and you might expect the resulting photos to conform to the glib narrative of before and after. Instead, the 28-year-old took pains to show “what real is, what raw is” – in this case stretchmarks, skin folds, contours like sand dunes. Raw is Kozerski naked, and frequently crying.

Nudity is an overused gesture in photography, particularly when it purports to “celebrate” the “ordinary”. You can’t turn on the TV (Lena Dunham), go to a gallery (Spencer Tunick) or, if you’re in San Francisco, enter a civic building these days without tripping over someone getting their kit off in the name of corporeal democracy. That Kozerski still manages to be shocking and interesting is testament to her ideas and her courage. The question most people ask on seeing the photos – after “Why don’t you get surgery to remove the extra skin?” – is “How did you get the weight off?” which she thinks misses the point. Losing the weight was tough, she says: “I had no idea who I was, and while I went through all that I was lost.” But what came after was tougher. Contrary to media everywhere, being thin isn’t enough of an identity to go on. “This is it!” she thought, when she finally got her weight down, and then: “Now what do I do?”

Life after extreme weight loss | Life and style | The Guardian

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

Weight Watchers saw all this happening and concluded that people didn’t have faith in diets. The company decided that what it offered was not a diet program but a lifestyle program. It was a behavior-modification program. (For the sake of expediency here, I will call its program a diet because it prescribes amounts of food.) When Deb Benovitz returned from her travels with news of dieting’s new language changes, the company realized that something had to change more than its marketing approach.

Weight Watchers’ chief science officer is Gary Foster, a psychologist — the first in that position, which previously had been held by dietitians. What he and his team realized from Benovitz’s research was that dieters wanted a holistic approach to eating, one that helped really change their bodies, yes, but in a way that was sustainable and positive. He got to work creating a new approach that would become known as Beyond the Scale: He used all available mind-body research to try to figure out a way for members to appreciate benefits of the program besides weight loss. This would help them stay on the program during setbacks and beyond their weight-loss period and allow the program to infiltrate their lives beyond mealtime and beyond plain old eating suggestions.

The company would move away from giving its members goal weights. It expanded its cognitive-behavioral strategies, which taught members to challenge unhelpful thinking and to respond to their emotions with reason, as opposed to with food or despair. It developed workshops that used meditation and qigong and didn’t once mention food or weight. It updated its apps and introduced a social-media program, Connect. It became as holistic-minded as the people told Benovitz they wanted a program to be.

But Weight Watchers was still a company called Weight Watchers, and it had to figure out a way to communicate all of this change to the public. People had too many associations with the brand. It needed someone other than the usual celebrity spokesdieter, a fat famous person who could be paid somewhere between $250,000 and $2 million to do the talk show circuit and People covers for a year. It needed someone who could fast-track the message that it was worth taking a new look at Weight Watchers.

Losing It in the Anti-Dieting Age – The New York Times

Can changing your mealtimes make you healthier?

Many people want to eat more healthily but find it difficult to change their diet. So what happened when Michael Mosley altered not what he ate, but when he ate?

We’ve known for some time that altering the time at which you eat can affect your weight and metabolism. At least if you are a mouse.

Based on mice studies, it seems the secret to improving your health is to restrict the time window within which you eat, and by doing so extend the amount of time you go without food.

A few years ago Prof Satchidananda Panda, from the world-famous Salk Institute in California, showed that mice fed on a high-fat diet, but only allowed to eat within an eight-hour window, were healthier and slimmer than mice that were given exactly the same food but allowed to eat it whenever they wanted.

BBC.com

How Americans can lose a lot of weight without giving up a single calorie

You’ve heard for years that the French and Japanese are much thinner than Americans because their diets are so much better than ours. A new mathematical model assesses why that is and how much thinner Americans could be if they changed their eating habits.

Washington Post