Fighting Obesity One Bite at a Time

By Dr. Madelyn Fernstrom

Now here’s a novel way to think about monitoring your food intake. Not by calories, or fat content, or grams of carbohydrate – but by how many bites you’re taking at each meal! Sound crazy? It’s quite true, and intriguing if it continues to work. Researchers at Clemson University have adapted a wrist gadget initially designed for the military to track body movements. They’ve created a unit to monitor “bites” by tracking hand to mouth motion. According to the investigators, this tracking is 90% accurate, and could be used as a predictor of how much a person is eating (or not eating!). A single “bite” is about 25 calories – and 80 bites per day equals about 2000 calories.

A consumer version, in the $100 range, is expected to be on the market in about a year. Could it work for you? It could help support more mindful eating. For those people gobbling down their food, this gadget might help them slow down and pace their eating. Or for those healthy eaters who just can’t seem to cut back on the amount of food consumed, it could improve portion control.

I’m totally in favor of any tool that might help make the battle of the bulge a little easier.

When it comes to weight loss, we need all the help we can get!