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I wonder if there is something like a Hawthorne effect for diets that would explain why almost any dietary change leads to some weight loss. Simply changing whe
by rubinelli 7y ago
I wonder if there is something like a Hawthorne effect for diets that would explain why almost any dietary change leads to some weight loss. Simply changing when they eat seems to make people ingest fewer calories.
- vidarh 7y agoIn this case compressing the period of time within which you eat reduced calorie intake. That is totally unsurprising, as it means odds are higher that you'll still feel full at any point during your eating window. Having done intermittent fasting, it's totally possible to get to the point that you spend most of your eating window hating food because you keep feeling like you've just had a massive meal. That you end up eating less then isn't so strange. It boils down to whether or not you manage to stick to the schedule, but one of the nice things about an intermittent fasting schedule is that it's never long until you can eat, and that makes compliance feel easier for at least some people.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoI'm not aware of a formal name for it, but there's certainly a hypothesis floating around that weight loss diets mostly work by altering the way that people pay attention to food. That is, the behavioral effects of being "on a diet" explain most of the weight loss while the particular rules and theory of any given diet explain little of the weight loss. It's sort of like the dodo bird verdict [1] for diets. It would be interesting to know if any studies have compared "real" and "placebo" diets to estimate this effect; searches mostly come up with references to a book called "The Placebo Diet" which seems related but I'm not sure it directly addresses the empirical question. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict