The Simple Trick To Losing Weight That Has Nothing To Do With Dieting

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When it comes to losing weight (or even maintaining your healthy weight), it’s not just about what’s sitting on the dinner plate in front of you. In fact, environmental factors and how you choose to engage with them during mealtime can make a dramatic difference when it comes to you achieving your health goals, according to a new study.

The research comes from professor and nutrition specialist Carolyn Dunn at North Carolina State University. Using the Eat Smart, Move More, Weigh Less (ESMMWL) online weight management program developed at the university, Dunn’s study evaluates the effectiveness of mindful eating in weight loss efforts.

The team recruited 80 participants interested in enrolling in the ESMMWL program, randomly assigning 42 of them to the intervention group and 38 of them to the control group (which meant they were placed on a waitlist for the program and continued behaving as they normally would). The 15-week ESMMWL program includes the idea of focusing on “planned behavior” and offers live instructional trainings to assist participants with habit recognition and change.

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To measure the impact of adding mindful eating to the program, researchers had participants fill out a 28-item questionnaire called the Mindful Eating Questionnaire, which assesses five different areas of mindful eating including paying attention to how food tastes, noticing personal hunger and fullness cues, planning mealtimes and snacks ahead of time, and savoring the flavors of just a couple bites of higher-calorie foods for the experience.

Only 28 of the 42 participants in the intervention group completed the program, but all of them lost more weight than the participants in the control group with the average weight loss difference being 3.5 pounds. Dunn presented these findings at the European Congress on Obesity in Porto, Portugal, in mid-May.

We all know that obesity is a major public health concern in the United States, and many of our eating habits that contribute to this epidemic are definitely less than mindful. We watch TV while eating dinner, text through breakfast while commuting and work while eating lunch. We snack out of boredom and when we’re stressed. When we don’t know what to do, we often reach for something to put into our mouths. We aren’t present with our food and the experience it can give us. But that might be a major factor in rewiring some of these pesky bad habits that feel impossible to shake.