Measurement of the effect on weight of a change in the frequency of a locally recognised pattern of eating or exercise
2013
Camacho, A.L. | Booth, D.A.
We have developed a method for directly measuring the ultimate effect on body weight of a maintained change in a well-known habit of eating, exercise or thermal control. The first step is to extract a consensus on the words used to identify common habits in a sample from the population to be studied. In this work, we focused on habits for which there is evidence of effects on weight. Volunteer first-year undergraduates recorded the reading on their bathroom scales once a week. At the same time, they recalled the timings of the most recent two occasions when they ate or moved in each pattern described in consensus wording. The reciprocal of the time between those events is a precise estimate of the current frequency of the habit. In a multiple-baseline experimental design, pilot results confirmed that lowering the frequency of fat-rich meals reduced weight, whereas weight increased with less frequent high-carbohydrate meals (low in protein as well as fat). Similarly, weight was lowered by fewer occasions of eating ‘snack’ (i.e., packet) foods and calorific drinks between meals, but fewer meals that included those same snack foods and drinks raised weight; that is, mis-timing of calories fattened, not the type of food. Data collected and analysed in the same way indicated that an increase in vigorous exercise may raise or lower weight. This approach to evidence-based wellbeing is readily implemented on computationally backed websites.
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