Healthy home may help keep the weight off
URL of this page: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_91140.html
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If you've lost a lot of weight and want to
keep it off, banishing high-fat foods and getting rid of your TV sets
might help, along with eating less and staying active, new research
hints.
Researchers found that people who had lost weight and had maintained a
normal weight for 5 years were much more physically active than obese
people who hadn't lost weight and were also being better able to
control their food intake.
But people's home environment also mattered, Dr. Suzanne Phelan of
California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and her
colleagues found. The weight loss maintainers had fewer TVs in their
homes, and were less likely to be stocking their shelves with fatty
foods.
Phelan and her team looked at 167 weight-loss maintainers and two
groups of 153 treatment-seeking obese individuals to investigate
behaviors and environmental factors that might promote sustained
weight loss. People in the control groups had been participating in
two different studies of weight loss interventions, but remained
obese.
People who had kept the weight off expended 2,877 calories in physical
activity per week, on average, compared to 762 per week for one of the
control groups and 1,003 for the other, the team found.
In addition, weight loss maintainers had fewer TVs in their homes and
more exercise equipment than the control groups.
There were also marked differences in the kinds of foods people had in
the pantry, with the weight loss maintainers having significantly
fewer high-fat items and more low-fat foods like fruits and vegetables
and low fat dairy foods.
The weight-loss maintainers clearly had stronger self-control than the
persistently obese people, Phelan and her team note, but it's not
clear why.
"The home environment of the weight-loss maintainers contained fewer
high-fat foods and televisions and, thus, may have demanded fewer self-
control resources than the more 'toxic' home environments of the
treatment-seeking obese," they note in the Annals of Behavioral
Medicine.
"You have to pay attention to your home environment if you want to
succeed," Phelan advised in a statement from the Health Behavior News
Service. "Do you have TVs in every room? When you walk into your
kitchen, do you see high-fat food or healthy food?"
"If you want to choose better foods, keep better foods within reach.
Don't just rely on willpower," Dr. David Katz, director of Yale
University School of Medicine's Prevention Research Center in New
Haven, Connecticut, commented in the statement.
"If you want to be more active, create opportunities for exercise that
are always within reach. Don't just rely on motivation," added Katz,
who wasn't involved in Phelan's study. "We should be propagating the
awareness that lasting weight control is about skill power, not just
willpower."
SOURCE: Annals of Behavioral Medicine, October 2009.
