Mindful eating may help in weight loss: study

Islamabad: A new study by Carolyn Dunn, nutritionist at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, has looked into the implications of greater awareness of eating in a weight control program. The study will be presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Porto, Portugal.

Dunn and his colleagues evaluated the effectiveness of conscious eating in an online weight management program called Eat Smart, More Move, Less Balance (ESMMWL), developed by NC State University and the NC Division of Public Health.
Although preventable, obesity is not an easy problem to solve because many causes and factors such as behavior, environment and genetic predisposition work together to initiate and sustain the disease. after the study.
Individual behavior affects diet, the amount of physical activity or inactivity, and the use of medication. Environmental factors, such as the availability of a variety of foods, the ability to physical activity, education and marketing of food also have a big impact, the study said.
Mindfulness is a type of Buddhist meditation in which a person focuses on their thoughts, feelings and feelings. An important feature of mindfulness is being careful without judging or judging: there is no thought or feeling that is right or wrong, there is only the awareness of what it is now.
Mindfulness emerged as a therapeutic practice in the 1980s through the work of people like Jon Kabat-Zinn and his mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the School of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester. Now there is a center of mindfulness.
The program uses a conscious feeding approach that encourages participants to focus on many aspects of food management and interaction, such as: To watch his taste, observe signs of hunger and fullness, meals and refreshments.
For their study, conducted in the form of a randomized controlled trial, the researchers surveyed people who wanted to enroll in the ESMMWL. Of the 80 respondents who answered yes, 42 were randomly allocated to the intervention group and 38 to the control group.
The results showed that participants who completed the program lost more weight than the others who stayed in the control group during this period. The average weight loss in the group that completed the program was 1.9 kilograms compared to the average 0.3 kilogram weight loss in the control group, a finding that researchers describe as "statistically significant."
All participants completed the QEM, but the differences before and after the total score were significantly higher in the group that completed the program than in the control group.
"The results suggest that there is a positive relationship between conscious eating and weight loss." This study contributes to mindfulness literature as very few studies use a rigorous methodology to investigate the effectiveness of an intervention on nutrition. In the meantime, nutrition experts say that some people eat gluten-free foods when they do not need them and end up eating less healthy foods.
Enter a grocery store in the US and you will find thousands of different items on the shelves. But among the many boxes, bags and boxes of food. Many of these products have the words "gluten-free" stamped on their labels. The trend of eating is so widespread that the term "gluten-free" is now synonymous with health, according to nutrition experts.
Andrea Garber, Associate Professor of Paediatrics at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Chief Nutritionist in the School's Eating Disorders Program and the Childhood Obesity Program.
She said that the option of eating only gluten-free products could be based on perceived health benefits and not on medical necessity. This could be the habit in what many in your field call "the halo effect".
The authors stated that over-reliance on food storage with gluten-free products poses serious health risks, especially to children. They called being overweight as the number one concern.

Where nutritional values of gluten-free products do vary significantly from their gluten-containing counterparts, such as having higher levels of saturated fat, labelling needs to clearly indicate this so that patients, parents, and caregivers could make informed decisions,” Dr Sandra Martínez-Barona, fellow lead researcher from the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria La Fe in Spain, said.

Garber said that the study is a good example of how confusing healthy eating has become. “Many people need gluten-free foods because of disease,” she said, adding, “But if you do not, and you eat gluten free, you might be undermining your own health attempts.”

People who have celiac disease do have legitimate reasons to check food labels.