Use Variety for Weight Loss

AICR Ever Green, Ever Healthy

February 2007

Topic: Lifestyle

Use Variety for Weight Loss

By the American Institute for Cancer Research

All too often, weight-loss diets deliberately limit foods and flavors; ultimately, people become bored, eat less and lose weight. Unfortunately, that’s also why people usually give up these diets, gorge on the foods they’ve avoided and regain any weight they’ve lost. Here’s a way to balance food satisfaction and reach a healthy weight for cancer prevention.

Eating habits are being studied more closely as a result of the current obesity epidemic. Along with monitoring people’s perception of portion size, a number of studies are also looking at how the composition of meals makes people eat more or less.

“A number of studies show that when people are repeatedly exposed to a food with a single flavor, they enjoy it less and eat smaller amounts.” says AICR Nutrition Advisor Karen Collins, M.S., R.D. “Other foods that seem similar also become less desirable. However, appetite for foods that taste different is unchanged.”

 Researchers say this leads people to eat more as the variety of foods in a meal grows. When several different types of sandwiches or pizza are offered, people eat more than when just a single choice is available. People eat more ice cream when a variety of flavors are offered instead of a single flavor, even if that single flavor is their favorite.

Make Variety Work for You

Even when your goal is losing weight, you can make the relation between variety and greater consumption work for you.  Depending on how you add variety to your diet, you can feel more satisfied after your meals and still consume fewer calories.  What’s important is the kind of food you choose. When subjects of a study consumed complex, high calorie foods (e.g., processed snack foods, bakery goods and heavy entrees), calorie intake and body weight increased. However, when others in the study ate a wider variety of simpler, low-calorie vegetables, they ended up eating more vegetables overall, but gained less weight.

A moderate amount of variety can help you eat a weight-loss diet you can also enjoy.

• Start by eating fewer foods high in calories (such as fatty meats) and choose more low-calorie foods, such as fresh vegetables and fruits, whole grains and beans.

• After choosing a variety of vegetables (such as carrots, bell peppers, chopped onion, fresh spinach and sweet potato or squash), combine them in a variety of dishes, like salad, soup or a stir-fry. Flavor them with healthful herbs, spices or low fat flavors like tomato sauce or lemon juice. Prepare them with a moderate amount of healthy fat, such as olive or canola oil.

• If you don’t have much time to prepare meals, prepare a recipe on the weekend that has several servings, and freeze or refrigerate individual portions for the week to come.

·        Treating yourself to a wide variety of deeply colored vegetables and fruits is the best way to get more phytochemicals in your diet. These natural plant compounds seem able to prevent cancer in a number of ways, including stimulating the immune system, blocking the potential for cancer-causing substances to be formed in the body, reducing inflammation and hormone production that may lead to cancer, preventing DNA damage and helping with DNA repair.