The Key to Weight Loss Success: You Don’t Need to Track Everything Every Day
Tracking everything consumed daily can be a difficult task and lead to discouragement, inevitably leading to less success with weight loss programs. The University of Connecticut, the University of Florida and the University of Pennsylvania recently conducted a study to evaluate the optimal thresholds for adhering to a weight-loss program. One specific program in partnership with Weight Watchers aimed to get empirical data through a clinical trial. By tracking data for six months, researchers found individuals only need to track about 30% of each day to lose more than 3% of weight or roughly 40% of each day to lose five percent or more of their body weight, with the most successful individuals able to track 70% of their days. By reducing the burden of tracking with the use of zero-point foods which do not require tracking, monitoring food intake can become less difficult allowing improved adherence to a weight-loss program. In addition to this, use of digital programs enables researchers to take a data-science perspective, providing behavioral insights for individuals and aiding in the process of tailoring weight-loss programs.
Refining Modern Weight-Loss Programs
By exploring adherence patterns through a clinical trial, researchers have been able to see what percentage of days need to be monitored to establish the effectiveness of a weight-loss program. These findings highlight the potential in digitization, enabling convenient use of technology to enhance weight-loss programs. For example, a personalized approach that caters to individual needs can reduce tracking burdens by utilizing a zero-point food list, providing individuals a sustainable weight loss option. Programs for weight loss are not one-size-fits-all, and researchers should use data science to program tailored approaches for individuals, ensuring success. Thus, creating a multidisciplinary team of clinical and data scientists, researchers can vastly improve their programs and make them accessible and approachable to a wider audience.
The Future for Weight Loss Programs
Digital programs can lead to the creation of in-depth and tailored weight-loss programs, with a focus on outcomes that suit individuals. With analyses of adherence patterns, researchers can determine when to provide additional support, categorize levels of adherence and determine who needs more encouragement. These advances pave the way for further insights, which could be used to create new programs to help people attain their desired weight loss goals with ease, such as identifying and targeting specific behaviors to change. Hence, the future of weight-loss programs appears promising, becoming more personalized, informative, and beneficial to individuals.
SUMMARY
Researchers conducted a study to evaluate the optimal thresholds for adhering to a weight-loss program. Individuals only need to track about 30% of each day to lose more than 3% weight; roughly 40% of each day to lose five percent or more of their body weight, with the most successful individuals able to track 70% of their days. Utilizing digitization enables researchers to take a data-science perspective, providing behavioral insights for individuals, improving adherence to a weight-loss program. Creating multidisciplinary teams enforce a tailored and informed approach to programs.
ADDITIONAL PIECE
The necessity of monitoring every day’s food intake can tremendously affect an individual’s adherence to a weight-loss program. Often, the need to count calories is seen as a tedious task, leading to a lack of motivation and, in turn, decreased success in the outcome of losing weight. However, with new advancements in technology, digitization makes it far more accessible and simpler for individuals to attain these weight loss goals while reducing the tedious burdens of tracking their food consumption.
To ensure consumers would adhere to a weight-loss program regularly, partners at WeightWatchers had requested empirical data through the clinical trial, taking advantage of the significant amount of user data available to gain insights. These findings have shown that the burden of monitoring food consumption could be significantly decreased by using zero-point foods, enabling individuals to shift focus from tracking what they eat and instead concentrate on other things, promoting engagement and, in turn, enhancing adherence to the program.
Researchers have also identified through the study that adherence patterns play a more crucial role in weight loss success. Identifying the need for a multidisciplinary team that centrally focuses on this issue, researchers can apply data science and clinical expertise to refine weight loss programs’ accuracy. Through this approach, researchers can gather detailed insights, categorizing individuals’ adherence to develop an informed and targeted approach for each case, ensuring maximum success.
As technology continues making advances, the future of weight-loss programs is much more promising, tailoring to individuals more easily and providing informative and easy-to-use weight-loss programs. Thus, weight loss programs present consumers with tremendous benefits as it becomes more comfortable, approachable, and efficient to create and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
With the findings of these studies, multidisciplinary teams will gain the valuable information required to create weight-loss programs tailored to individuals, taking the unique characteristics of each into consideration. In doing so, the team’s comprehensive approach will revolutionize the methods implemented to achieve successful weight loss. Moreover, incorporating these methods into everyday life will not only help individuals improve their overall health and well-being but also enable them to adapt to a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle, providing numerous benefits that go beyond achieved weight loss goals.
With applied targeted and refined weight-loss programs in the foreseeable future, it will promote individuals who struggle to lose weight with greater opportunities for success, with the foremost focus on health and well-being, achieved through individual approaches, made more accessible through digitization.
Thus, once researchers enable the provision of accessible, informative, and efficient weight loss programs through multidisciplinary endeavors and the relentless pursuit of innovation, individuals can benefit from achieving long-term weight loss goals, promoting overall health as well as overall well-being.
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Keeping track of everything you eat and drink in a day is a tedious task that is difficult to maintain over time. Unfortunately, obedient follow through is a vital component to successful weight loss; however, a new study in Obesity finds that perfect tracking is not needed to achieve significant weight loss.
Researchers from UConn, the University of Florida, and the University of Pennsylvania followed 153 weight-loss program participants for six months, in which users self-reported their food intake using a commercial digital weight-loss program. The researchers wanted to see what the optimal thresholds for following the diet were to predict a 3%, 5% and 10% weight loss after six months.
“We partnered with WeightWatchers, who were planning to launch a new personal points program, and they wanted to get empirical data through our clinical trial,” says co-author and Department of Allied Health Sciences professor Sherry Pagoto.
Pagoto explains that the new program takes a personalized approach to assigning points, including a zero-point food list to eliminate the need to calculate calories for everything.
“Diet tracking is the cornerstone of all weight loss interventions, and it tends to be the biggest predictor of outcome. This program reduces the burden of that task by allowing zero-point foods, which don’t need tracking.” .
Researchers and developers are looking for ways to make the tracking process less onerous because, as Pagoto says, for many programs, users may feel like they need to count calories for the rest of their lives: “That’s just not sustainable.” Do users need to track everything every day or not necessarily?”
With six months of data, Assistant Professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, Ran Xu, was interested to see if there was a way to predict outcomes based on how much participants followed their diet. Ran Xu and Ph.D. in Related Health Sciences. Student Richard Bannor analyzed the data to see if there were any patterns associated with weight loss success from a data science perspective. Using a method called receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, they found how many days people need to track their food to achieve clinically significant weight loss.
“It turns out that you don’t need to track 100% every day to be successful,” says Xu. “Specifically in this trial, we found that people only need to track about 30% of days to lose more than 3% weight and 40% of days to lose more than 5% weight, or nearly as much. 70% of days to lose more than 10% of the weight. The key point here is that you don’t need to track every day to lose a clinically significant amount of weight.”
This is promising, as Pagoto notes that the goal for a six-month weight loss program is typically 5-10%, a range in which health benefits have been observed in clinical trials.
“A lot of times people feel like they need to lose 50 pounds to be healthier, but we actually start to see changes in things like blood pressure, lipids, cardiovascular disease risk, and diabetes risk when people lose between 5 and 10% of its weight”, says Pagoto. “That can be achieved if participants lose about one to two pounds per week, which is considered a healthy rate of weight loss.”
Xu then looked at the diet adherence trajectories over the six months of the program.
The researchers found three distinct trajectories. One they call high trackers, or super users, who tracked food most days of the week for six months and, on average, lost about 10% of their weight.
However, many participants were from a second group that began regular follow-up, before their follow-up gradually decreased over time to, at the four-month mark, just one day per week. They still lost about 5% of their weight.
A third group, called low crawlers, started crawling just three days a week and dropped to zero at three months, where they stayed for the remainder of the intervention. On average, this group lost only 2% of their weight.
“One thing that is interesting about this data is that often in the literature, researchers are only looking at whether there is a correlation between follow-up and overall weight loss results. Ran took a data science approach to the data. and discovered that there is more to the story,” says Pagoto. “Now we are seeing different follow-up patterns. This will help us identify when to provide additional support and who will need it most.”
The patterns could help inform future programs that could be adapted to help improve tracking of users based on the group they belong to. Future studies will delve into these patterns to understand why they arise and hopefully develop interventions to improve outcomes.
“For me, the exciting thing about these digital programs is that we have a fingerprint of the behavior of the participants,” says Xu. “We can dig into the nitty-gritty of what people are doing during these programs. Data can inform precision medicine approaches, where we can take this data science perspective, identify patterns of behavior, and design a targeted approach.”
Digitally delivered health programs provide researchers with a wealth of data they have never had before that can lead to new insights, but this science requires a multidisciplinary approach.
“Before, it felt like we were flying in the dark or just following anecdotes or self-reported measurements, but it’s different now that we have so much user data. We need data science to make sense of all this data. This is where Team Science “It’s very important because clinical and data scientists think about the problem from very different perspectives, but together we can produce insights that none of us could do alone. This must be the future of this work,” says Pagoto.
Xu agrees: “From a data science perspective, machine learning is exciting, but if we only have machine learning, we only know what people are doing, but we don’t know why or what to do with this information. That’s where we need clinical scientists like Sherry to make sense of these results. That’s why team science is so important.”
No longer flying in the dark, these multidisciplinary teams of researchers now have the tools to begin tailoring programs further to help people achieve their desired results. For now, users of these apps can rest assured that they can still get meaningful results, even if they miss a few inputs.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230608120944.htm
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