This vital weight loss technique is nothing to do with diet and exercise.
Learning to love your body, however it looks, can triple weight loss efforts, research finds.
Dieters in the study learned to be less concerned about their size and weight and other people’s opinions of them.
They were also encouraged to think that how their body looks is not as important as they think.
Happily, the researchers found, people with an improved body image, automatically eat more healthily.
The study shows that hating your own body is one of the biggest barriers to weight loss.
It is well-known that people who are overweight often have body image problems.
Overcoming these problems — especially worrying about what other people think — is hugely beneficial to weight loss.
For the study, 239 overweight women followed a standard program of diet and exercise for one year.
Half were given a special course designed to improve their body image.
This included sessions on the emotional aspects of losing weight.
This is because some overweight people tend towards emotional eating.
Emotional eating means that negative moods trigger bouts of eating to feel better, rather than eating to satiate hunger.
The women were also encouraged to love their bodies, whatever its size and shape.
The results showed that those who improved their body image lost an average of 7 percent — more than triple the weight loss of the control group.
Dr Pedro Teixeira, study co-author, said:
“Body image problems are very common amongst overweight and obese people, often leading to comfort eating and more rigid eating patterns, and are obstacles to losing weight.
Our results showed a strong correlation between improvements in body image, especially in reducing anxiety about other people’s opinions, and positive changes in eating behavior.
From this we believe that learning to relate to your body in healthier ways is an important aspect of maintaining weight loss and should be addressed in every weight control program.”
The study was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (CarraƧa et al., 2011).