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Tag: weight
Are You A Willpower Wimp? Then Change Your Environment To Lose Weight

Are You A Willpower Wimp? Then Change Your Environment To Lose Weight

By Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times

Need to lose weight? Instead of changing yourself, you might consider changing your environment.

Making changes — big and small — to the world around you is much easier than mustering the willpower to refrain from eating high-calorie foods, says Brian Wansink, who has for years studied our eating habits, currently as director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.

And those changes can mean that your diet is more healthful without working so hard.

Wansink dismisses the popular idea that mindful eating is the way to eat what we need without overeating junk food. “For 90 percent of us, the solution to mindless eating is not mindful eating — our lives are just too crazy and our willpower’s too wimpy,” he writes in his new book, “Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life.”

The book includes ways restaurants, schools, and other institutions can offer more healthful food, and provides scorecards for readers to figure out whether their homes and workplaces, the restaurants and supermarkets they patronize and their kids’ school meals, are designed for slim.

Restaurants and food companies are likely to change if they can make more money, Wansink noted in a telephone interview. “If a bunch of consumers say, ‘Is there something you can come up with that’s not French fries or a boring salad? I would eat here more often,'” then companies are likely to listen, he said.

They’re in the profits business, not in business to make people fat, he said. It’s a lesson Wansink and his students stumbled upon when they realized that the bigger the package of food, the more people ate of it, and that consumers would pay more for smaller packets that would help them control how much they ate.

“Eventually, Nabisco/Kraft gave my theory a run and launched the 100-calorie snack pack,” Wansink writes. It’s the sort of change that helps people eat less with no effort.

“Most of our lives have made us fat by design,” Wansink said. So it’s time, he said, to make ourselves thin the same way. Here are some of his findings and suggestions; pick those that work for you, he says.

— If you come home through your kitchen door, you’ll weigh more than your neighbor who goes home through another room. Solution? Kind of obvious.

— Wansink and his researchers spent a lot of time watching and cataloging the behavior of people who ate at buffet restaurants. The slim diners scouted out the entire spread before taking any food and then cherry-picked their favorites. Heavy diners went straight for the plates and started piling on from the start of the line. And thin diners sat far from the buffet facing away from it. You can guess what the others did.

— If your plate is the same color as your food, you’re likely to serve yourself 18 percent more food. You can either buy new dishes, or color-code your meals if you want to eat less. But here’s a hint: White plates and lots of pasta, potatoes, and rice? Maybe not. Smaller plates are better, too.

— Clear the counters! The average woman who had potato chips on her counter weighed 8 pounds more than a neighbor who did not, Wansink writes. Big deal, it’s chips, you say? Get this: Woman with a box of breakfast cereal visible anywhere in the kitchen weighed 21 pounds more than that neighbor who kept it in the cupboard, Wansink writes.

— If you are really serious, move your pantry food to a closet elsewhere in the house and that closet’s stuff into the kitchen closet. Or put up shelves in a faraway room to hold the food. That, Wansink writes, will decrease “browsing” for snacks and make you think before the food gets to your mouth.

— Buying in bulk saves money, right? But Wansink writes that one study showed people ate half the chips, cookies, ramen noodles. and the like in the first week — regardless of how much they bought. What to do? Buy only healthful foods in bulk. Or repackage the items once you get home and store some far from the kitchen, he writes.

— Pay attention to the menu. On average, Wansink writes, a dish described as “buttery” has 102 more calories than a similar one not described that way. Crispy? Adds 131 calories, he writes.

— To lessen cravings while in the supermarket, chew gum, Wansink says. When he and colleagues gave shoppers gum at the start of a shopping trip, they bought 7 percent less junk food than their empty-mouthed fellow shoppers.

Photo via WikiCommons

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Breakfast Reconsidered

Breakfast Reconsidered

We’ve heard it all our lives – breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But as pervasive as that axiom is, there really is no scientific evidence to support it.  Now the New York Times reports that scientists at a number of universities around the world, who have been studying the morning meal and its impact on weight loss have found that eating or skipping breakfast had no effect on the weight, level of blood sugar, or cholesterol of the sample groups.

The study at the University of Bath (England) found “After six weeks, their body weights, resting metabolic rates, cholesterol and most measures of blood sugar were about the same as they had been at the start, whether people ate breakfast or not. The one difference was that the breakfast eaters seemed to move around more during the morning; their activity monitors showed that volunteers in this group burned almost 500 calories more in light-intensity movement. But by eating breakfast, they also consumed an additional 500 calories each day. Contrary to popular belief, skipping breakfast had not driven volunteers to wolf down enormous lunches and dinners — but it had made them somewhat more sluggish first thing in the morning.”

Dr. Emily Dhurandhar of the University of Alabama says that according to the data available from these studies “breakfast may be just another meal.”  But as with all studies, these carry cautionary notes. “Each study was fairly short-term, however, and involved a limited range of volunteers. More randomized experiments are needed before we can fully understand the impact of breakfast, said James Betts, the professor who led the study of lean people. It’s not yet clear, for instance, whether heavy people’s bodies respond differently to morning meals than lean people’s, or if the timing and makeup of breakfast matters.”

Photo: flickr.com

To Slim Down, It Helps To Get Up Early And See The Light, Study Says

To Slim Down, It Helps To Get Up Early And See The Light, Study Says

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES—To maximize your chances of fighting flab, new research offers some simple advice: Wake up early and go outside.

People who loaded up on light exposure at the beginning of the day were most likely to have a lower body mass index, according to a study published this week in the journal PLOS ONE. That relationship between morning light and BMI was independent of how many calories the study participants consumed.

It may sound crazy, but there is sound scientific evidence to back up the link. Circadian rhythm plays an important role in regulating metabolism, and studies have shown that exposure to morning light can influence body fat and the hormones that regulate appetite.

In one study, for instance, sleep-deprived subjects whose levels of the hormones leptin and ghrelin were out of whack saw those levels improve after being exposed to light for two hours after waking up. In another study, obese women who were exposed to bright light for at least 45 minutes between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. dropped some of their body fat after three weeks. And studies in animals have found that altering light exposure changed their metabolism, resulting in weight gain even when the animals consumed the same amount of calories as before.

With all this in mind, researchers at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago persuaded 54 volunteers to wear a wrist monitor that measured their light exposure (including its timing and intensity) as well as their sleep patterns. The volunteers were also asked to keep a detailed log of everything they ate and drank during a seven-day period.

The volunteers (whose average age was 30) tended to be night owls — on average, they went to sleep at 1:26 a.m. and woke up at 8:49 a.m. Compared to Americans as a whole, they were thin, with 58 percent reporting a body mass index of 24 or lower.

When the researchers analyzed the data, they found only one variable that correlated to BMI: MLiT. That stands for “mean light timing above threshold,” and it’s a measurement that takes into account the timing, length and brightness of each volunteer’s light exposure.

Translating that into practical terms, the researchers said the key was to bask in light of at least 500 lux, and that such basking was most valuable when the exposure came early in the day. For every hour that light exposure was delayed, BMI rose by 1.28 points.

The complete mathematical model took into account demographic factors like age and gender; the amount of sleep and exercise volunteers got; and the season of the year. But of all these variables, MLiT did the best job of predicting a person’s BMI.

When the researchers limited their analysis to BMI and light exposure between the hours of 8 a.m. and noon, they found no significant correlation. This suggested that light exposure throughout the day helps regulate body weight, the researchers wrote.

But there’s clearly something special about morning light. They’re not sure what it is, but one possibility is the fact that morning light contains more wavelengths in the blue portion of the spectrum. “Blue light has been shown to have the strongest effect on the circadian system,” the study authors wrote.

It shouldn’t be too hard to get yourself exposed to 500 lux. A typical office is about that bright. If you go outside, you’ll get more than 10,000 lux in full daylight, and if it’s overcast you’ll still get more than 1,000 lux.

Although more study is needed, of course, the researchers concluded that “light is a powerful biological signal and appropriate timing, intensity and duration of exposure may represent a potentially modifiable risk factor for the prevention and management of obesity in modern societies.”

Wednesday’s study was funded by grants from various branches of the National Institutes of Health.

Photo via Wikimedia

Surgery Is Best For Managing Diabetes In Heavy People

Surgery Is Best For Managing Diabetes In Heavy People

Washington (AFP) – When it comes to managing type 2 diabetes in overweight people, stomach-shrinking surgeries are still more effective than trying to shed pounds with pills and lifestyle changes, researchers said Monday.

Three years into a U.S. study that compares various approaches — gastric bypass, sleeve gastrectomy and simply trying medical counseling, diet, exercise and weight loss medications — the findings show that the two surgical procedures are still superior at reducing blood sugar and weight.

Researchers said their findings could provide a way to help the some 23 million American adults who have type 2 diabetes, most of whom are overweight or obese.

Fewer than half of adults with diabetes are able to get their blood sugar under control with medication, experts say.

The latest results from the largest randomized controlled trial of its kind were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and discussed at the American College of Cardiology annual meeting.

“Bariatric surgery was more effective than medical therapy in achieving glycemic control with weight loss as the primary determinant of this outcome,” said study author Sangeeta Kashyap, associate professor medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. “We concluded that bariatric surgery should be considered as a treatment option for the treatment of type 2 diabetes in patients who are moderately and severely overweight.”

The research included 150 overweight people with uncontrolled diabetes that had persisted for at least eight years when they began the study, despite taking three or more medications.

They were randomly assigned to undergo one of the two surgeries plus counseling, or simply expert therapy in health changes without surgery.

After three years, just five percent of patients who did not have surgery had achieved the desired level of glycemic control, defined as a three-month average blood glucose level of six percent or lower.

That target is slightly more aggressive than the American Diabetes Association recommendation of seven percent.

The surgery groups did much better, with 37.5 percent of gastric bypass and 24.5 percent of sleeve gastrectomy patients meeting the mark, after starting at an average blood sugar level of 9.2 percent.

Weight loss was five to six times greater in patients who had one of the surgeries.

The gastric bypass group lost on average a quarter of their body weight while the sleeve gastrectomy patients shed 21 percent. Those on medical therapy alone lost four percent.

Meanwhile, people who did not undergo surgery reported no improvements in quality of life, according to eight measures including body pain, general health, energy and fatigue.

Gastric bypass patients reported five improvements and sleeve patients reported two. There were no major complications among those who underwent the surgeries.

Gastric bypass involves reducing the stomach to below three percent of its natural volume, then connecting a new gastric pouch that bypasses the stomach and goes straight to the intestine.

In sleeve gastrectomy, part of the patient’s stomach is removed to reduce its volume by about 75 percent.

Gastric bypass outperformed the sleeve gastrectomy in the study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Cleveland Clinic and Ethicon, a division of pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson which sells surgical products for weight loss.

Amit Khera, associate professor at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, who was not involved in the study, described the research as “important” because it addresses the longer-term benefits from surgery versus counseling and weight loss attempts alone.

“In the surgical arm, it does seem to be quite durable,” he told reporters. “Normalizing blood sugar seems to be retained at three years. That is a really important observation.”

On the other hand, people who did not have surgery showed early improvements in their blood sugar, dropping close to the target of 7.5 in the first year.

But that group was back up to 8.4 percent in year three.

The study, called the Surgical Treatment and Medications Potentially Eradicate Diabetes Efficiently (STAMPEDE) trial, is designed to follow its patients for a total of five years.

AFP Photo/Vanderlei Almeida