http://thedecisiontree.com/blog/2009/10/losing-weight-requires-the-right-tools-but-not-necessarily-the-fanciest-ones/ a blog about predictive medicine and the future of healthcare Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:14:44 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://thedecisiontree.com/blog/2009/10/losing-weight-requires-the-right-tools-but-not-necessarily-the-fanciest-ones/comment-page-1/#comment-4602 … but does it work? « Follow the Data Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:42:46 +0000 http://thedecisiontree.com/blog/?p=815#comment-4602 [...] The Decision Tree quotes a report from the the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research which says that people who kept track of how much food they ate lost twice as much weight as people who didn’t in a study about weight loss. As a press release puts it, “It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.” The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in August. However, the effect is much more powerful if people exercise and self-track together, in line with ideas about “social contagion” that I have discussed before. [...] [...] The Decision Tree quotes a report from the the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research which says that people who kept track of how much food they ate lost twice as much weight as people who didn’t in a study about weight loss. As a press release puts it, “It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.” The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in August. However, the effect is much more powerful if people exercise and self-track together, in line with ideas about “social contagion” that I have discussed before. [...]

]]>