This Work Habit Could Be Making You Fatter

She says that although walking was found to have the most impact on food intake during the study, any form of distraction while eating can lead to weight gain.

The shocking resuts revealed how the participants who ate the cereal bar while walking around consumed five times as many calories at the taste test.

“Eating on the go may make dieters overeat later on in the day”, said lead study author Jane Ogden, professor at University of Surrey in England. In addition, because the experiment was conducted in a lab setting the researchers are not confident that participants in the walking group subsequently ate more because they had been moving and eating, or because they were embarrassed by the strangeness of the situation (i.e. pacing a corridor and eating a cereal bar while being monitored).

This led them to suggest that additional research should be done to investigate on the long-term effect of walking as a distraction and its relationship with overeating and gaining weight.

Eating “on the go” could increase the risk of obesity, according to a new study.

Sixty women participated in this study.

In the “watching TV” group and, to a lesser extent, the “socializing” group, those who identified as dieters consumed less mass and calories when compared with the non-dieters.

In contrast, their calorie intake, just a short time later, was substantially higher than that of dieters who’d snacked while watching TV or having a conversation. Furthermore, an extended analysis revealed that participants assigned to walk ate five times more than those under different conditions. They were especially fond of gobbling chocolate. Or it may be because walking, even just around a corridor, can be regarded as a form of exercise which justifies overeating later on as a form of reward.

“If we eat ‘on the go” or in front of a computer, we will feel less full as our attention is diverted away from the meal and we don’t learn the association between food and mealtimes’.

People who sit down to eat mindfully are also more likely to choose nutritious foods and have other healthy habits, while those who eat on the run may be downing a lot of processed convenience foods.

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Health Psychology.

Afterwards, the women were asked to complete a follow-up questionnaire and a taste test with four different snacks.

Despite all the unknowns, it makes sense to eat more mindfully, both Ogden and McDaniel said. When we are distracted and our defenses are down, we don’t just eat more but underestimate how much we’ve eaten.