Childhood Obesity - Do you have an overweight child? We offer tips to help your child lose weight and get fit!

If you want to lose weight, or are trying to help your overweight child achieve a healthier weight, keep the diet plan simple. This advice is consistent with the conclusions reached by researchers with Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

• Researchers assigned 390 overweight women to the Brigitte or the Weight Watchers diet plans.
  
• Brigitte is a simple diet in which participants get a shopping list and then follow a simple meal plan.
  
• Weight Watchers is more complicated and requires dieters to weigh and measure foods, assign points to each food, and keep under a certain number of points every day.
  
• The women on the more complicated plan tended to get discouraged and give up.

The researchers noted that there are both physical diet environments and mental ones. The optimal physical environment involves keeping sugary, high fat foods unavailable, installing exercise equipment, etc. An optimal "cognitive environment" should be simple.

"For people on a more complex diet that involves keeping track of quantities and items eaten, their subjective impression of the difficulty of the diet can lead them to give up on it," said Peter Todd, a professor in Indiana University's department of psychology and brain sciences.

Labels: weight loss