New research has uncovered simple ways to trim 100 calories or more from your diet without skimping on flavor. While it doesn’t sound like much, shaving off 100 calories a day could help you trim 10 lbs or more in a year even if you never set foot in the gym.
Wet your whistle
You’re more likely to crave veggies than greasy French fries, chips, or other high-fat foods if you pair a meal with water instead of caloric beverages. Researchers at the University of Oregon say that food-drink pairings can influence the type of food choices we make and the amount of calories we eat. In the study, adults who paired a meal with water were more likely to eat their vegetables and make other healthy food choices than if they sipped on soda.
Stop staring at sugar
To help you keep sugar cravings in check, a recent study says you should look the other way when you see pictures of high-fat, high-calorie, or sugary foods. That’s because brain scans have shown that ogling pictures of high-calorie treats stimulates parts of the brain that control hunger and the reward center, says Kathleen Page, MD, assistant professor of medicine at USC and the study’s lead author. Bottom line: maybe your Pinterest board of cupcakes isn’t the best idea.
Sleep more
Several studies say you could wind up hungrier than if you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. One study from the Mayo Clinic shows getting less than 6 ½ hours of sleep a night can lead to consuming as many as 500 excess calories in a day.
Being sleep deprived can increase how hungry you feel and lead to downing more calories than you’d eat if you weren’t exhausted, says Manfred Hallschmid, PhD, department of medical psychology and behavioral neurobiology, University of Tübingen and lead researcher of a separate study on sleep and calorie consumption.
“Sleep deprivation can raise levels of appetite hormones like ghrelin,” he says.
Surging levels of ghrelin, the hormone that revs up your appetite, can lead to eating hundreds of extra calories than when you’re well-rested, according to Dr. Manfred Hallschmid.
Dim the lights
A recent study from Cornell University says the secret to eating less – and feeling more satisfied with what you do eat – could be as simple as some mood lighting. People who ate a meal under soft, warm lighting consumed 175 fewer calories, and finished 18% less of the food on their plates, than those who dined in brightly lit places.
Those in the darker rooms also rated food as more enjoyable than the other group. Scientists think that’s because the harsh fluorescent lights commonly found in fast-food restaurants may create a psychological need to rush through meals and eat more. Consider this your chance to actually use those candlesticks you got for your wedding ages ago.
Don’t say: I can’t
Whether you’re trying to sidestep a fast-food drive-thru or the office doughnuts, don’t tell yourself what you can’t eat. Instead, tell yourself you “don’t” eat it. In a recent study, when researchers divided a group of people into “can’t eats” and “don’t eats,” 64% of those in the “don’t” group passed up a candy bar in favor of a healthier granola bar – but only 30% of the “can’t” group chose the healthier snack. “Can’t” sounds more like punishment than being healthy, creating a sense of self-deprivation that can tank your motivation. On the other hand, reminding yourself you “don’t” eat certain foods feels more empowering.Think thin The way you think about food and your body can determine your success at sticking to a healthy diet. Over a 10-year span, 59% of women who started out with an average body mass index (BMI) of 20 but thought they were overweight, wound up packing on weight and watching their BMI swell to more than 25. That weight gain likely happened because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, says Susan Albers, psychologist at The Cleveland Clinic and the author of Eating Mindfully and 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food.
“Your mindset is incredibly important in giving up or getting on track with your weight,” she says.
“So if you think you are not overweight, regardless of your actual weight, you will act in ways that lead you to what you already believe.”
Be a straight shooter
They might look stylish, but swanky, curved drinking glasses on your table could lead to extra weight. A British study found that people consumed 60% more alcohol, sugary sodas, and juices if the glass they drank from was curvy, rather than a straight tumbler. The researchers speculate that people drink faster from the curvy glasses because it’s harder to tell when you’re at the halfway point, meaning you’re more likely to reach for another drink sooner and end up consuming more.
Scientific evidence increasingly points to a far deeper problem that confronts dieters: cutting out calories changes your metabolism and brain, so your body hoards fat and your mind magnifies food cravings into an obsession.
Slimmers have often feared this was somehow true, but now science confirms this cruel fact of nature. New research shows dieting raises levels of hormones that stimulate appetite – and lowers levels of hormones that suppress it.
Meanwhile, brain scans reveal that weight loss makes it harder for us to exercise self-control and resist tempting food. Worse still, the more people diet, the stronger these effects can become, leaving some almost doomed to being overweight as a result of their attempts to become slim.
And as research lays bare the dangers of yo-yoing weight, some experts argue it would be better not to diet at all.
Researchers, including Joseph Proietto, a professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne, have uncovered one of the main possible reasons. Two years ago, his team recruited 50 obese men and women, and coached them through eight weeks of an extreme 500-to-550-calories-a-day diet (a quarter of the normal intake for women).
At the end, the dieters lost an average of 30 lb. Joseph Proietto’s team then spent a year giving them counseling support to stick to healthy eating habits. But during this time, the dieters regained an average of 11 lb. They also reported feeling far hungrier and more preoccupied with food than before losing weight.
As the researchers reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, the volunteers’ hormones were working overtime, making them react as though they were starving and in need of weight-gain. Their levels of an appetite-stimulating hormone, ghrelin, were about 20% higher than at the start of the study. Meanwhile their levels of an appetite suppressing hormone, peptide YY, were unusually low.
Furthermore, levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and raises the metabolic rate, also remained lower than expected.
Joseph Proietto describes this effect as “a co-ordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight”. In other words, the body had launched a backlash against dieting.
The team’s landmark study reinforces a belief among biologists that the human body has been shaped by millennia of evolution to survive long periods of starvation.
Cutting out calories changes your metabolism and brain, so your body hoards fat and your mind magnifies food cravings into an obsession
The human frame contains around ten times more fat-storing cells in relation to its body weight than most animals (polar bears, which have to endure long stretches when prey is unavailable, are similarly fat-rich).
Our calorie-hoarding frames have strong mechanisms to stop weight loss, but weak systems for preventing weight gain. If you manage to lose 10% of your weight, your body thinks there’s an emergency. So it burns less fuel by slowing your metabolism.
The body learns to function on fewer calories, resetting your metabolism. The problem is if you then stop dieting and start eating more again, those extra calories are stored as fat.
This effect kicks in after around eight weeks of dieting – and can last for years. Studies by Columbia University show this metabolic slowdown can mean that just to maintain a stable weight, people must eat around 400 fewer calories a day post-diet than before dieting.
Why would this be so? Muscle samples taken before and after weight loss show that once a person drops weight, the fibres may change to become more fuel-efficient – burning up to a quarter fewer calories during exercise than those of a person at the same weight naturally.
How long this state lasts isn’t known, though some research suggests it might be up to six years.
It’s also thought the brain changes in the way it reacts to food. This wilts our willpower, according to Michael Rosenbaum, a researcher at Columbia University Medical Centre who studies the body’s response to weight loss.
“After you’ve lost weight, there’s an increase in the emotional response to food,” he says, adding that there is also “a decrease in the activity of brain systems that might be more involved in restraint”.
In 2010, Michael Rosenbaum and his colleague, Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Centre, scanned the brains of people before and after weight loss while they looked at objects such as grapes, chocolate, broccoli and mobile phones.
After losing weight, the scans showed a greater response in the areas associated with reward and a lower response in those associated with self-control.
And last year, scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York discovered that when starved of food, brain cells actually consume each other. This causes the release of fats, which in turn results in higher levels of a powerful brain chemical that stimulates appetite, the journal Cell Metabolism reports. All bad news for dieters, as going without food could make them even hungrier.
All of this helps to explain why an analysis of 31 long-term clinical studies found that diets don’t work in the long run. Within five years about two-thirds of dieters put back the weight – and more. The researchers from the University of California found that dieting works in the short term, with slimmers losing up to 10% of their weight on any number of diets in the first six months of any regimen. But after this, the weight returns, and often more is added, says their report in the journal American Psychologist.
The analysis concluded that most volunteers would have been better off not dieting. Their weight would be pretty much the same and their bodies would not have wear and tear from yo-yoing.
This backfire effect is worst among teenagers: people who start habitually dieting young tend to be significantly heavier after five years than teens who never dieted. This mix of biology and psychology translates into a sobering reality: once we become overweight, most of us will probably remain that way.
Certainly, we should all be worried about what dieting does to our health. Restricting calories may increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, according to a study from 2010 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
Ultimately, of course, we should be more wary of piling on the pounds, than relying on diets to reverse the damage.
