Research explains easiest way to diet

Being healthy is about moderation for freshman Quincy Masur.

Masur has never tried a specific diet, such as Weight Watchers or the Atkins diet.
Instead, she said she relies on making healthy choices when deciding which foods to eat and cutting out fried foods, fats and sugars.

“I feel like a lot of diets take it to the extremes,” Masur said. “I try healthy eating habits instead of something ridiculous like the cabbage diet. When people have to count calories or weigh food, it’s not realistic.”

A new research report titled “When weight management lasts: Lower perceived rule complexity increases adherence” looked at food decision-making and the complexity of two particular dietary measures, said Jutta Mata, a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University.

Mata said she proposed the study as part of her dissertation.

Peter Todd, informatics professor at IU, and Sonia Lippke, assistant professor in the Department of Health Psychology at Free University of Berlin, assisted Mata in the study.

“No one had ever looked at that subject before,” Mata said. “In dieting, you have rules; very explicit decision rules about eating. If you don’t try to control your intake, you eat whatever’s in front of you.”

She said the researchers hypothesized that if people perceive a diet’s rules as less complex, they are more likely to stay on the diet.

The study compared the dieting behavior of women following two different plans, Weight Watchers and Brigitte, and found the hypothesis to be correct, Mata said.

The researchers recruited women on different diets from online discussion groups, Todd said.

“The long-term success of different weight management programs should be measured not just in terms of direct weight loss, but also, as here, in terms of how long people stick to their program,” the report said. “Designing weight management rules that can be adhered to for a long period or an entire lifetime – including by making rules that are not perceived as being too complex – could help limit the spread of overweight and obesity.”

While willpower by dieters plays an important role in the research, Mata said complexity of the diet is the main factor in how long a person will stick with it.

When choosing a new diet, Mata said people should first look at the rules and think about how complicated they are.

“If they already think the rules are complex, they shouldn’t go on that diet,” she said.

Todd said the important thing is not just getting the weight off, but keeping it off. If a dieter quits early, he said, he or she is less likely to keep off the weight.

“The next step would be to actually design some diets that have different complexities,” he said. “Then get people to follow the diets and see if they stick to them.”