Weight-Loss Keys: Food Journals, Eating In, Not Skipping Meals

July 13, 2012 - 11:08 am | Category: Health

If you are trying to lose weight, adopting three key strategies will boost your chances of success, new research suggests.

Keep a food journal, avoid eating out often and don’t skip meals.

“Greater food-journal use predicted better weight-loss outcomes, whereas skipping meals and eating out more frequently were associated with less weight loss,” writes Dr. Anne McTiernan, a research professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle. In the new study, she and her colleagues looked at a wide range of behaviors and meal patterns to evaluate what works and what doesn’t.

Their findings are published July 13 in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

The study lends support to the value of many strategies long suggested for weight loss or maintaining a weight loss, McTiernan said. “Our study was unique in asking about all of these behaviors in one weight-loss intervention study, to see which ones actually worked.”