Overweight eat fewer meals

[BendtheBar]

Found this and posting for discussion.

Overweight people eat fewer meals than others - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Normal weight adults, including those who had lost a lot of weight and kept it off, ate more often than overweight people in a new study looking at factors that may help in preventing weight gain.

Researchers following about 250 people for a year found that overweight individuals ate fewer snacks in addition to meals than people in the normal body weight range, but the overweight still took in more calories and they were less active over the course of the day.

"Most of the research has shown that people who eat more frequently have a lower weight," said lead researcher Jessica Bachman, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. "But no one knows why."

In particular, Bachman told Reuters Health, she wanted to understand what people who have lost significant amounts of weight do to maintain their weight loss, as a first step to helping guide others in losing weight and keeping it off.

More than 60 percent of Americans are obese or overweight, but the relationship between the number of meals people eat each day and the ability to maintain weight loss has remained unclear, she said.

Bachman and her team analyzed data collected in two large studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. One looked at the eating habits of people with a body mass index (a measure of weight relative to height) between 25 and 47, which is considered overweight to obese.

The other study looked at adult men and women who were normal weight (BMI of 19-24.9), about half of whom had lost at least 30 pounds and maintained their lower weight for more than five years.

The researchers found that, on average, the normal weight subjects ate three meals and a little over two snacks each day, whereas the overweight group averaged three meals and just over one snack a day.

Generally, though, "weight loss maintainers" consumed the fewest calories, at about 1,800 a day, compared with the normal weight and overweight subjects, who took in 1,900 and more than 2,000 calories a day, respectively.

Weight loss maintainers also were the most physically active of the three groups, Bachman said, burning off about 3,000 calories a week through exercise and other activities, compared to 2,000 calories a week among the normal weight subjects and 800 calories a week in the overweight group.

The results, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, suggest that weight loss maintainers intentionally do more to keep from regaining extra pounds, Bachman said.

"It appears that being extremely physically active and eating more often helps them keep the weight off," she said. "Most commonly, they were walking at least 60 minutes a day seven days a week."

Bachman believes her study is the first to compare eating frequencies among successful weight loss maintainers, other normal weight people and those who are overweight.

She speculates that snacking might help prevent weight gain by staving off intense hunger.

"If you eat more often, it stops you from getting too hungry," Bachman said. "If you wait 10 hours after you've last eaten, you end up eating a lot more food. If you sit down and you're really hungry, you also tend to eat more calories."

More research is needed, Bachman added, because the reasons that eating more often tends to be associated with having a lower BMI are still unclear.

"This is kind of research as a baseline, and from there we can develop some hypotheses," Bachman said. "Weight loss maintainers are a new group that really is starting to get a lot of attention. The idea is to find out what they are doing, and get other people to do the same thing."

SOURCE: Elsevier Journal of the American Dietetic Association, November 2011.

[jslep]

that's a joke right..............

[BendtheBar]

Something is fishy. The overweight folks aren't even eating more than 2000 a day...

[jslep]

"It appears that being extremely physically active and eating more often helps them keep the weight off,"

"If you eat more often, it stops you from getting too hungry,"

is she tryin to win the most preposterous stayment of the year award?

[Fazc]

"If you eat more often, it stops you from getting too hungry," Bachman said. "If you wait 10 hours after you've last eaten, you end up eating a lot more food. If you sit down and you're really hungry, you also tend to eat more calories."

Straw man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[BendtheBar]

So we have:

Overweight: 4 meals and 1900-2000+ calories.
Normal: 5 meals and 1800 calories.

The only thing of interest in this story to me is that no one sticks to 3 squares a day. Perhaps the protein supplement industry knew something we didn't all long and simply wanted us to eat healthier.

[Soldier]

I've actually read studies that show that spreading meals throughout the day really is the best for avoiding intense hunger that can lead to binging. I also find the info in this article fishy though. Hardly anyone eats "3 meals + X number of snacks". That implies to meal that 3 meals is some sort of standard starting point from which people add to create their daily intake. That's not realistic.

I also don't agree with the calorie counts. People aren't getting obese off 200 extra calories a day.

In the end, information only helps you if you can define it's relationship to what you're trying to accomplish. The small differences between the reported meal frequency of the different groups tells me that there really isn't anything here worth noting when it comes to diet planning.

[tank]

i don't know over what span of time these people in this study supposedly ate like that, but if they continue to for 8-12 weeks they would all probably lose weight and the mystery would be solved.

[bruteforce]

Hunger and calorie intake were inversely proportional for me when I was fat. If I wasn't particularly hungry, but was bored, 5000 calories could disappear in an instant. If I was starving, I usually couldn't make it past 2000. One thing I do remember well was that I never ate breakfast, would have a big lunch (3-4k calories) and a bigger dinner (5-6k).

I'm also curious what the heck these weight loss maintainers are doing to require so few calories. To maintain me 140 pound loss, I need about 3500-4k calories a day depending on the intensity of my training. Sure, I'm a bigger guy than most of their subjects, but really, 1800 still seems like a nice sized dinner to me...

As long as I'm ranting, the biggest issue seems to be the idea that walking for an hour a day is "extremely active". I get 30-40 minutes of walking in daily just going from one building to another on campus. When I'm in Europe for work, its not uncommon for 90 minutes a day. (Which may be why no matter how much I eat over there, I still drop 5-7 pounds a week for the first couple weeks).

In conclusion, people need to look at the idea of health differently. The goal needs to be to keep excess fat off rather than keeping weight down. I have less fat at 245 after 18 months of training than I did at 215, my lowest weight after committing to lose fat. Calories aren't the enemy, sedentary lifestyle and excessive intake is.

[5kgLifter]

Originally Posted by BendtheBar

Something is fishy. The overweight folks aren't even eating more than 2000 a day...

Yep, and they stipulate on most food packaging that the normal daily amounts for an adult female are 2,000 calories, and for an adult male 2,500