A Natural Diet Guide

American Journal of Preventive Medicine has just published the findings of the largest and longest running weight loss maintenance trials that demonstrates that a person can double weight loss by simply keeping a daily food diary. This study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and is one of the few that recruited a large percentage of African American participants.

This study should prove invaluable for the 44-percent of African Americans in the study and even more beneficial to this group in general, as they have a higher risk for conditions that are aggravated by being obese and/or overweight. African Americans are more predisposed to diabetes and hypertension.

On average, African American participants were able to lose nine pounds. It appears that by simply writing down what you eat encourages people to eat less, resulting in eating fewer calories and twice as much as those that keep no records.

This is good news for the more than two-thirds of the American population that is obese. If on average, we could set a goal that everyone (including the obese) lose nine pounds like these study participants did, we would be able to reduce the incidence of hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and stroke by a significant amount. In fact, it was found in an earlier study by a Kaiser Permanente researcher, Victor Stevens, Ph.D. that losing as much as five pounds can alter the risk of getting high blood pressure by as much as 20-percent.