A study from the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food an Environment seems to have gotten right to the root of the issue of weight loss and helped a group of people not only lose weight, but also keep it off.
By thinking about the root cause of some peoples’ over eating, Kelly Webber devised a study combining diet and food awareness with stress management. The idea is that simple diet and exercise will make a person lose weight, but doesn’t address the reason the weight is there in the first place.
Webber is a self proclaimed “emotional eater” and a lot of people, according to her, eat as a result of emotions. Therefore, by combining the diet with stress relief courses should stop this from happening.
Webber’s study showed positive results. The control group she got to just diet and be aware of what they were eating only lost minimal amounts of weight, whereas the 26 people she put into both a diet regime and stress relief courses lost as much as 17 pounds. Furthermore, the weight loss lasted at least until the 14 week follow up observance.
26 people are not a very large study group and leaves plenty to be desired in terms of reliability. However, the results are very promising, and hopefully further, larger studies will be carried out to prove that stress relief can help weight loss on a large scale.