LEARNING TO LOSE WEIGHT

Practicing weight-watching skills before you start a diet may be the key to keeping weight off for good. A new Stanford University study suggests that learning how to maintain your current weight—without trying to shed pounds—helps prevent you from gaining back lost pounds later. (click below to read more)


Researchers put more than 250 overweight women into two groups. In one, women began dieting right away by eating healthier foods and exercising. In the other, women were asked not to lose any weight, but merely to spend eight weeks working on weight-maintenance skills, such as weighing themselves daily and being mindful of portion sizes and calorie intake. That “practice run” allowed the women to “work out the kinks” involved in maintaining a regular weight “without the pressure of worrying about how much weight they had lost,” study author Michaela Kiernan tells ScienceDaily​.com. After eight weeks, they launched into the same diet program as the other group, and shed roughly the same number of pounds. But in the year following their diet, they regained only half the weight that the traditional dieters did.