Academics Prove I am Right: Photo-dieting helps you lose weight

A friend sent me a link to an article in the online version of The Daily Mail newspaper. The article was headed ‘The Flash Diet: taking photos of meals helps slimmers lose weight’.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked 43 people to record what they ate in both words and photographs. They found that

‘photo diaries were a far more effective and accurate record of daily calories and a far more powerful disincentive to overeat.’

I, and the others who have been doing this for some time, know this to be true. However, I have to disagree with the assertion that seeing the photos of how much they ate gave dieters ‘a guilt trip’ about how much they ate. It isn’t clear whether that came from the research or from the reporter. As it is the Daily Mail, I suspect the latter. Guilt trips are not a healthy attitude to eating or dieting and weightloss. Guilt trips are not what photodieting is about.

I think of it, as the subtitle of my blog says, as ‘food re-education through a lens’ with the emphasis on re-education. About what I eat, when I eat and how much I eat.

Still it’s nice to know that university academics agree with me, even if their sample size was less than half that of the members of the flickr Photo-diet Project group.

Tags: Daily Mail, flash diet, flickr, nutrition, photo-diet