Lose Weight by Text Messaging?

If you’re annoyed by your child’s constant cell phone text messaging, don’t be! Text messaging may have some health benefits! A new study from the University of North Carolina suggests that cell phone text messaging could be used to reduce children’s chances of becoming overweight later in life, by helping them monitor their own behaviors now.

How so? Writing down your caloric intake and other diet information is considered very important for long-term success of weight loss. Traditionally, people trying to lose weight write down on paper how many calories they consume, how many calories they burn in exercise and how much they weigh. While a paper diary can be very effective, researchers had a hunch that the same concept might work better in children if they could report their self-monitoring via cell phone text messaging – and receive feedback messages in return.

“Cell phone text messaging is something that’s very familiar to most children now, since they’ve grown up with it,” said on of the researchers. “By using this technology, we were hoping to make self-monitoring on a diet seem more like fun to them and less like work.”

So the researchers gave each family in a controlled text messaging group a cell phone to be used only for study-related messages. They were instructed to send two messages per day (one from the parent and one from the child) reporting their answers to the three questions. Each time a message was sent, the sender received an immediate, automated feedback message based on what the sender reported. The researchers generated hundreds of feedback messages for the study. One example was, “Wow, you met your step and screen time goals – congratulations! What happened to beverages?”

And the results? Children in the text messaging group stayed with the weight loss self-monitoring program longer than peers who used a paper diet diary, and in addition those who used cell phone text messaging were more likely to stick to their diet than those who used the traditional paper diary.

Source:

University of North Carolina School of Medicine

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Comments

One Response to “Lose Weight by Text Messaging?”

  1. Nate on November 13th, 2008 12:13 pm

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