Stepping on the Scale Everyday can Help You Shed Kilos and Maintain Weight Better

About 40% of weight lost with any dietary treatment is regained in one year, and almost 100% of weight loss is regained at the end of five years. However, a new study has revealed that you can keep off from re-gaining your lost weight by keeping a daily track of your weight by stepping on scale everyday. This is especially helpful to men to lose weight and keep from gaining it again. Study subjects who lost weight the first year in the program were able to maintain that lost weight throughout the second year using this strategy. Professor David Levitsky at Cornell University said, "A person just required a bathroom scale and an excel spreadsheet or even a piece of graph paper." During the study, the participants were randomly separated into an intervention group and a control group. Subjects in the intervention group were first given a target of 1% weight loss, which they could lose in any manner they chose.

Levitsky said, "Because they didn’t prescribe, everyone found their own way of losing the weight, whether they reduced portion size, stopped snacking or skipped a meal. After the study we found that it worked better for men than for women."

Overall, the researcher team believes that stepping on a scale and tracking one’s weight acts as reinforcement for some behaviors, such as eating less and it strengthens others such as going for a walk in order to maintain body weight.

The study is published in the Journal of Obesity.

Source-ANI