The 6 new rules of weight loss

1. Eat more meat

Should you be eating more meat to lose weight? There are lots of studies that show that protein can be one of the biggest factors in keeping you full and satisfied. Everyone from Atkins to Pierre Dukan has touted the meat-filled diet as a total winner. Do studies support this? Yes! “It is well established that under most conditions,” says the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, “protein is more satiating than the isoenergetic ingestion of carbohydrate or fat. This suggests that a modest increase in protein, may promote satiety and facilitate weight loss.”

2. Eat more breakfast

Some interesting news you may not have heard: The University of Tel Aviv recently released some research that found dieters who consumed 2925 kilojoules at breakfast, 2090 kilojoules  at lunchtime and just 0.836 kilojoules  at dinner were a lot more likely to lose weight and waist circumference than dieters who consumed just 836 kilojoules at breakfast and 2925 at dinner.

3. Eat fat

Recently, a meta-analysis was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The study connected data from 21 unique studies that included almost 350,000 people, about 11,000 of whom developed cardiovascular disease (CVD), tracked for an average of 14 years, and found out that there is not a relationship with the intake of saturated fat and the incidence of heart disease or stroke.

4. Eat carbs

Yes, it’s true, cutting out carbs will do you no good. This study from The New England Journal of Medicine says, “The low-carbohydrate diet produced a greater weight loss (absolute difference, approximately 4 percent) than did the conventional diet for the first six months,” which sounds great until they say, “but the differences were not significant at one year (and) adherence was poor and attrition was high in both groups.”

5. Don’t snack

Science daily says that snacking might even give you a fatty liver – yerch. “Snacking on high-fat and high-sugar foods was independently associated with abdominal fat and fatty liver (hepatic steatosis),” the recent research has shown. When I looked at the study I found this out, “a hypercaloric diet with frequent meals increases intrahepatic triglyceride content and fat around the waist, but increasing meal size did not.”

6. Self-monitor your weight

American scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have found that various “self-monitoring techniques” in old and slightly overweight and obese women, “showed that simple changes in behaviour can make a difference on the scales.” The study found that the women that kept journals of what they ate lost 2 ½ kilos or 6 pounds. They also found that exercise alone doesn’t equal much weight loss. Read about it here.