It is hard and difficult to maintain over time to keep track of everything you consume in a day. Sadly, a recent study shows that diligent tracking is an essential element for effective weight loss.
The findings of the study, published in ‘Obesity’, finds that perfect tracking is not needed to achieve significant weight loss. Users of a commercial digital weight loss programme who self-reported their food intake were followed for six months by researchers from UConn, the University of Florida, and the University of Pennsylvania. The goal of the study was to determine the ideal diet tracking levels for predicting 3 per cent, 5 per cent, and 10 per cent weight reduction after six months.
"We partnered with WeightWatchers, who was planning on releasing a new Personal Points program, and they wanted to get empirical data via our clinical trial," says co-author and Department of Allied Health Sciences Professor Sherry Pagoto.
Pagoto explains that the new program takes a personalised approach to assigning points including a list of zero-point foods to eliminate the need for calculating calories for everything.
"Dietary tracking is a cornerstone of all weight loss interventions, and it tends to be the biggest predictor of outcomes. This program lowers the burden of that task by allowing zero-point foods, which do not need to be tracked."
Researchers and developers are seeking ways to make the tracking process less burdensome, because as Pagoto says, for a lot of programs, users may feel like they need to count calories for the rest of their lives: "That's just not sustainable. Do users need to track everything every single day or not necessarily?"
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With six months of data, Assistant Professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences Ran Xu was interested to see if there was a way to predict outcomes based on how much diet tracking participants did. Ran Xu and Allied Health Sciences Ph.D. student Richard Bannor analysed the data to see if there were patterns associated with weight loss success from a data science perspective. Using a method called receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis they found how many days people need to track their food to reach clinically significant weight loss.
"It turns out, you don't need to track 100 per cent each day to be successful," says Xu.
"Specifically in this trial, we find that people only need to track around 30 per cent of the days to lose more than 3 per cent weight and 40 per cent of the days to lose more than 5 per cent weight, or almost 70 per cent of days to lose more than 10 per cent weight. The key point here is that you don't need to track every day to lose a clinically significant amount of weight."
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This is promising since Pagoto points out that the goal for a six-month weight loss program is typically 5 per cent to 10 per cent, a range where health benefits have been seen in clinical trials.
(ANI)