Seattle researchers’ key to dieting success: Keep a journal

There are as many dieting schemes as there are calories in
a box of donuts. You can eat a low-fat foods, avoid carbs,
turn your back on red meat, consume nothing but protein,
chug water, skip dessert. But if you really want to lose
weight, Seattle researchers offer three strategies for
success.

Key weight loss strategy number one:
Accountability.

“Writing down what you eat, how much you eat and how many
calories and doing that each day all the time is really
key,” said Dr. Anne McTiernan. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center M.D. found that women who kept the best
food journals lost significantly more weight than other
study participants.

McTiernan and her colleagues asked obese, post-menopausal
women about various dieting strategies as part of a larger
study on the effect of weight loss on various risk factors
for breast cancer. She says the strategies should apply to
most other dieters, too.

McTiernan suggests carring the journal with you, adding
that it’s difficult to change your diet when you’re not
paying attention. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have
to count every, single calorie.

“Coffee and tea, for example, might have 2 or 3 calories
per cup so that’s something you probably don’t need to
write down. But, if you’re drinking coffee drinks that
have a lot of cream and sugar, find out what those
calories are and write those down,” she advises.

The researchers asked study participants to restrict
caloric intake to 1,200 to 2,000 per day depending on
their baseline weight with a goal of losing 10 percent of
their body weight.

McTiernan wanted to examine calorie-cutting behaviors
because research has shown that cutting total calories is
more important than what you eat.

But a recent study out of Boston Children’s Hospital
suggests the type of nutrition does matter. The Boston
study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, flies in the face of conventional wisdom by
suggesting that certain foods can trigger the disposition
to get fat and that a low carbohydrate diet helps obese
people who’ve lost weight, to keep it off.

McTiernan, though, insists it’s still about the calories.
“There may be some people that are going to do very well
on a low carbohydrate diet and they could try that out but
if they have a low carbohydrate diet and don’t reduce
their calories, chances are they’re not going to lose
weight, and that’s been tested,” she countered.

Strategy number two: The Fred Hutchinson study
results, published Friday in the Journal of the Academy of
Nutrition and Dietetics, advises dieters to not skip
meals.

“We did see that women who skipped meals lost less weight
than women who didn’t and we think that’s probably because
they were so hungry by the next time they ate that they
overate,” speculates McTiernan.

The third and final best weight loss strategy:
Avoid restaurants. “Restaurant food is great. The
problem,” says McTiernan, “is knowing what’s in it.” She
says even a restaurant salad can wreak havoc on a diet.

“A salad at home might just be 100 calories (but) at a
restaurant it might be 500 or 1,000 calories so you could
easily be spending most of your daily calories at one meal
if you’re eating out a lot,” McTiernan warns.

McTiernan’s study found that even the dieters who didn’t
include exercise in their regimen still met their weight
loss goals as long as they followed the big three
strategies of journal keeping, eating regular meals and
staying away from restaurants.