According to a French study, eating while listening to your appetite, regardless of your emotions and without depriving yourself, is associated with a lower risk of overweight and especially obesity.
Listening to your hunger helps you to be slim. This is what the study ofa team of French researchers from Inserm (1) according to which people who eat only when they are hungry and stop when they are satisfied, regardless of their emotions at the time, have more weight. Unpublished results published in the journal Obesity.
This so-called “intuitive” diet is also characterized by individuals who find an alternative to food in the event of stress or anxiety. “In other words, allowing themselves to eat whatever they want from the moment the body asks for it,” says Sandrine Péneau, the main author of this work.
More than 50,000 participants
The use of a questionnaire, the Intuitive Eating Scale-2 (IES-2, translated into French by the same team) allowed researchers to study this way of eating in participants in the cohort NutriNet-Health. This is a vast study launched in 2009, focusing on the determinants of eating behavior and the links between diet and health, based on a ten-year follow-up. via online surveys.
Among the volunteers, 11,774 men and 40,389 women aged 50 on average answered the IES-2 questionnaire and provided their height and weight to calculate their BMI (2). And the results are final. They show that those who had the best scores on the IES-2 questionnaire, ie responding the most to the “intuitive” eating criteria, had the lowest risk of being overweight or obese.
Ineffective diets
The association was particularly strong in women, and for obesity. Better, this link persists when we segment the different components of the “intuitive” diet: “This means that eating only when you are hungry is associated with a lower risk of overweight and obesity, eating for physical reasons and non-emotional as well, as well as the fact of not restricting yourself when you are hungry ”, summarize the authors in a press release.
“This last point seems to confirm that restriction, and therefore diets, do not work in the long term as many studies tend to show”, adds Sandrine Péneau.
But for the scientists, it is important to say it again, “because there is a potentially strong public health message behind this”. “The mentions: eat slowly, listen to your hunger, or even trust your bodily signals, could in my opinion quite appear in the National Health Nutrition Program (PNNS), in the same way as eating five fruits and vegetables a day or avoiding to eat too fatty, too salty, too sweet, ”she concludes.
(1) Unit 1153 Inserm / Inra / Cnam / University Paris 13, Epidemiology and statistics research center, EREN team, Bobigny (93)
(2) Body Mass Index
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