The secret to shedding pounds in midlife
New research suggests creeping weight gain isn’t inevitable in middle age. You just need to put your mind to it.
Is creeping weight gain inevitable in middle age? On Monday, Nick Mitchell, the owner of the Ultimate Performance chain of gyms, made headlines when he claimed that Britain is “losing the war” on obesity. However, two new studies, both published last month, appear to offer hope by attempting to unravel what it is that makes some people successful at shedding midlife pounds while others face an uphill struggle with weight loss and maintenance from their mid-thirties onwards.
For one of the papers researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and the University of Derby interviewed a group of men aged 35-58 about their relationships with food and their dieting history. The men, who had signed up for a weight-loss program, were also asked why they thought they may have gained weight and how they felt about their spare tyre or two. The results were telling. Dr Mark Cortnage, a lecturer in public health at ARU and co-author of the paper, says that interviews revealed the men displayed “a sense of resignation” about their weight gain and cited family and work commitments as two of the main reasons why they had put on pounds.
Most were despondent about their weight, especially if they had been slim in their twenties, claiming it gnawed away at their self-esteem. And Cortnage says that for many it sparked a cycle of high-calorie comfort eating, which resulted in even more pounds piling on.
“What surprised me was that binge-eating episodes were common among these men when they got home from work,” Cortnage says.
“They were caught in a spiral of getting home, sitting on the sofa and eating crisps or biscuits and a glass of wine or beer.” Only when they were introduced to psychological strategies to rethink their approach to food and the consequences of poor choices did their weight start to drop.
“In many cases it was the simplest steps that had the greatest effect,” Cortnage says.
“When the men started to keep tabs of their intake and focus on the fact that binge-eating just developed guilt with no long-term benefits, their approach to food changed for the better.”
In a follow-up study, to be published shortly, the men managed 91 weeks of successful healthy weight maintenance by becoming more aware of what and when they were eating.
Results of another larger-scale study, published in the journal Obesity, involving more than 6000 successful male and female dieters — to take part they had to have shed at least 22kg and kept off the weight for more than three years — also delved into the mental mechanics of weight loss and maintenance.
Suzanne Phelan, professor of kinesiology and public health at California Polytechnic State University and lead author, conducted detailed interviews to find out what strategies most helped the participants, who had an average age of 53, to lose weight.
“What stood out for me was the extent to which participants reported that past memories at a higher weight motivated their current actions to keep that weight off,” she says.
“Many of them also described past health issues and some of their descriptions of experiences of weight-based stigma brought tears to my eyes.” Phelan says she discovered the key to successful weight loss is to develop a battery of tricks of cognitive restraint.
“The biggest mistake made by failed dieters is that they give up,” she says. “Persistence appears to be key.”
Here’s how to prepare your mind for weight loss:
Track everything you eat every day
As tedious as it may sound, logging your daily food intake was key for keeping weight off in Phelan’s recent study, with participants claiming that it helped to keep them on track. There’s plenty of proof that self-monitoring works. “It improves conscious control of eating, a similar strategy to doing nothing else while eating,” Phelan says. When researchers from Duke University asked overweight people to weigh themselves regularly and track daily food intake using a free smartphone app (in this case it was MyFitnessPal), those who did it diligently lost the most weight after 12 weeks. It needn’t be too time-consuming. A 2019 study from the University of Vermont found that dieters who spent a total of just 15 minutes a day recording their food intake were more successful at losing 10 per cent of their body weight than non-recorders. Phelan says one of the comments made by a participant in her study was typical: “Tracking was instrumental in helping me lose weight and two-plus years later I still track what I eat almost every day.”
Practise ‘future thinking’
What you might call willpower, psychologists call “future thinking” or delayed gratification. The ability to project yourself into the future, imagining what you will feel or look like if you overeat right now, was found to be a powerful tool for the participants in both new studies. “It means learning to think about future outcomes of current behaviour – despite cues that may be distracting you,” Phelan says.
“For example, an ability to think about long-term health goals when faced with a buffet of calorically dense food options, tempting you to eat beyond satiety.” Laboratory studies have also shown how asking people to vividly imagine future events reduces overeating. “During any meal, we have to make a lot of decisions – how much to eat, which foods to eat and when to stop eating,” Cortnage says. “It can be really helpful to think about how these decisions will play out in the longer term rather than just opting for a food that is gratifying in that moment.”
Eat the same foods (at the same time) at weekends
Weekends can be the enemy for our waistlines as Phelan found in her investigation. “Statistics from the US National Weight Control Registry tell us that weight-loss maintainers eat the same during the week as the weekend,” she says. “They have high consistency in their food choices and behaviours.”
Others have shown that consuming more calories at weekends – that extra glass of wine or bowl of crisps – takes its toll. One study at Washington University School of Medicine found that people tend to lose weight more slowly than expected largely because they binge, albeit unintentionally, at weekends. Most calories were consumed on Saturdays and the typical weekend weight gain equated to an average increase of 9lb a year. But it’s not just what we eat at weekends, it’s when. A group of Spanish researchers found that changes in mealtimes produces “eating jet lag” that is as “physiologically disruptive” as shift work and can contribute to weight gain. They showed that those with an overall eating jet lag of three and a half hours or more at weekends, meaning all of their regular meals were much earlier or later than on weekdays, had higher BMI values than those who stuck to a regular eating routine.
Focus on health consequences
Men are generally appalling at thinking about health consequences of a poor diet and weight gain, says Cortnage. “Plenty of research supports the fact that women associate the health consequences of diet much more than men,” he says. “We found that repeatedly telling men their risk of a heart attack would rise if they continued eating a lot of processed meat and foods just led to them disengaging, when actually focusing on the healthfulness of eating can have a powerful effect if you buy into it.”
Yet, as Phelan discovered, focusing on possible or experienced health issues can be a powerful motivational tool. In research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, psychologists compared the weight-loss of women with three different goals: to change their appearance to themselves, to others, or to improve their health. Women highly motivated to lose weight to improve their appearance to themselves gained weight at 30 months, whereas those focusing on health gains (or their appearance to others) achieved clinically significant weight loss.
Prepare to deal with setbacks
What set successful dieters apart from those who struggled to lose weight in Phelan’s research was their surprising ability to bounce back after setbacks. “The weight-loss maintainers were able to view the longer-term goals and accept that there would be temporary interruptions as part of their journey,” Phelan says. “Many of them were able to get back on track at the next meal.”
One of her successful participants described how she adopted the mindset of “put one foot in front of the other and just keep going. There will be peaks and valleys, plateaus, gains, bad times, but just get up and do what works 80 to 90 per cent of the time and you will get there”.
Another said she achieved weight loss by approaching it as “lots of little decisions made every day. Don’t allow yourself to start quitting in small ways, because they lead to quitting everything.”
The Times
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