Can Surfing the Internet Help You Lose Weight?

The Web, it sometimes mesos seems,is a siren specter that lures us into sitting around like some speciesof houseplant while our trunk grows abnormally wide. Its abundantenticements keep us from doing what we know we should, like, say,making any movement whatsoever or consuming foods that do not comepackaged in styrofoam.
But according to new research, the Internet can also be something else: a place for helping people keep weight off.
The new study, conducted over a two-and-a-half-year period, found thatthe more often people logged on to a website, the more likely they wereto maintain weight loss. Of course, it wasn't just any old website, butone that investigators at the Kaiser Permanente Center for HealthResearch (KPCHR) had designed specifically to help people keep thepounds off.
What made the website work, the authors of the study believe, was itsmixture of accountability and sociability. Users were asked log in oncea week to enter their weight and the amount of exercise they'd done. Ifthey didn't log in regularly, they got a little nudge by e-mail, thenan automated phone call. Once on the site, users could chat with otherparticipants of the study in a kind of mini-Facebook setting.
The site was designed to mimic as much as possible what it's like to be in a weight-loss wow goldprogram that offers personal counseling and group meetings. It wasn'tquite as effective as human-to-human interaction, but it was betterthan nothing at all. "While personal counseling may be the Cadillacversion, it's not practical for everyone," says Kristine Funk, leadauthor of the study, published in the Journal of Medical InternetResearch.
The study began with 1,600 overweight or obese participants, about 350of whom lost enough weight — an average 19 lb. — during the first sixmonths to stay in the trial for the Web-based maintenance phase. By theend of that two-and-a-half-year portion of the study, the users who hadlogged on the most regularly — at least once a month for 28 months —had kept off the most weight, an average of 9 lbs. People who used thewebsite the least kept off only 3 lb. on average. "The consistencypiece is definitely very important for keeping weight gain at bay,"says Funk.
None of this is particularly surprising to Nancy Makin, who lost morethan a quarter of ton after her sister bought her a computer for herbirthday in 2003. Afraid to go out, because of the stares her 703 lb.frame attracted, she went online buy wow gold and found she could easily make friends with people who couldn't see her.
"The people on the Internet didn't know they were supposed to rejectme," says Makin, who now weighs about 170 lbs. "And that fed me and Iwas allowed to let my spirit come out. I replaced a very poor tool forjudging myself with a very fulfilling activity."
Once she found a community online, Makin says began to lose weight, notbecause she was less hungry, but because she had an activity besideseating that made her feel good. And because she felt better aboutherself. "I had 20 emails in my inbox each morning," she says.
The original KPCHR site is no longer live, but Funk notes there areplenty of others that do almost the same thing. "What you want to lookfor is a site that has a few key components: a recording feature tokeep track of weight, a feedback mechanism and support resources fromeither experts or other high quality information," she advises.
Makin, whose memoir, 703, came out earlier this year, says that whileaccountability is important for those who are merely overweight,community may be more important for people who are morbidly obese likeshe was. "The key is to find contentment and value in yourself byreaching out and doing something not for you, and the weight will comeoff as a side effect," she says.
And if you have a website where you can talk about it, so much cheap wow gold the better.