Repeating the same meals and keeping calorie intake steady produced more weight loss than eating a more varied diet among individuals living with overweight or obesity, a short-term trial showed.
“Conventional wisdom around dieting says you should incorporate a lot of different foods to avoid getting bored and that you should splurge on the weekends or special occasions so you don’t feel as deprived,” lead author Charlotte Hagerman, PhD, of the Oregon Research Institute, Springfield, Oregon, told Medscape Medical News. “This contradicts research showing that consistency makes your behavior more habitual, that is, more automatic or effortless.
Study participants who repeated many of the same foods and kept calories consistent lost more weight over 12 weeks (5.9% vs 4.3% of their body weight) than those with more varied meals.
Researchers analyzed real-time food logs from 112 adults with overweight or obesity who were enrolled in a long-term, structured behavioral weight-loss program. Participants’ mean age was 53 years, the mean BMI was 34.5, and most (85%) were female.
The investigators focused on the first 12 weeks of the program because previous studies showed that this period is long enough to achieve meaningful weight loss and because food tracking adherence tends to decline and become unreliable after the initial period of motivation.
Participants were asked to track everything they ate each day using a mobile app and to do daily weigh-ins using a wireless scale. A full day of tracking was defined as at least 800 calories per day for at least 75% of the study days. The researchers then measured how “routinized” each person’s diet was in two ways. First, they looked at caloric stability, or how much a person’s daily calorie intake fluctuated from day to day and between weekdays and weekends.
(Medscape)
