Many weight loss diets support the claim that you can lose weight if you eat less. If you want to lose weight, it is not enough to eat less, to get bored, to feel guilty because you do not eat what you want, or to stay at the gym for a whole day. A new study revealed that eating less is not the best weight loss method.
Faris Zuraikat, a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University, is the author of the study which collected and analyzed the data of a 1-year long trial on how different food servings influence weight loss.
The first part of the trial consisted in the training of the subjects to gain a bigger control on what they eat and how much they eat. The second part of the trial compared the trained subjects’ new eating habits with those of the untrained subjects.
The researchers split the subjects into three groups, as follows:
- 34 overweight women who did not participate in the training trial;
- 29 women with regular weight who did participate in the training trial;
- 39 overweight and obese women who did participate in the training trial, also;
Study’s authors served the same amounts of food to every participant but let the subjects to decide on which preparations to eat or not.
When the researchers served bigger servings, all the participants ate more food, but the ones who participated in the training trial were observed to control the calorie intake better than the subjects who didn’t participate to the ‘calorie-control’ training trial. Moreover, participants who learned how to control the calorie intake also chose to eat healthier foods in comparison to the other subjects.
The researching team considers that the study’s results are important as they are clearly showing that eating less is not the best weight loss method while eating more low-calorie, nutritious and healthy foods will regulate the body’s metabolic rate and may trigger a weight loss process.
