The key to weight loss: 'Log often, lose more'

Log in with your Medical News Today account to create or edit your custom homepage, catch-up on your opinions notifications and set your newsletter preferences.Sign up for a free Medical News Today account to customize your medical and health news experiences.Obesity is now a common health issue.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), almost 40 percent of adults in the United States had obesity in 2015–2016.This figure has been steadily increasing since 1999.Most people are aware that obesity carries many health risks, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. From this data, the team could see not only what people were eating but also how often they recorded their food intake and how long they spent doing it.Dietary self-monitoring lasted for 6 months, after which the researchers calculated how long it took people each day and how successful this strategy was for weight loss.The results feature in the journal Obesity in a paper called "Log Often, Lose More: Electronic Dietary Self‐Monitoring for Weight Loss." By the sixth month, this had dropped significantly to 14.6 minutes.The researchers believe that this decrease could be due to two factors: the participants' efficiency in logging their diet and the online program's ability to predict regularly used words and phrases.This important finding proves that dietary self-monitoring is not as difficult a task as people think, especially with the invention of numerous relevant apps. However, it was "those who self-monitored three or more times per day and were consistent day after day" who were the most successful, says Harvey."It seems to be the act of self-monitoring itself that makes the difference — not the time spent or the details included."Lead author Jean HarveyHarvey and colleagues hope that the study will encourage people to get on board with self-monitoring as a safe and effective weight loss technique.