Wanting to drop body fat or increase our muscle mass can often be an insurmountable task likened to scaling Everest. We dedicate hours to the gym, believe we’re putting ourselves onto a healthy and balanced diet and yet still the scales don’t show us the figures we wish to see.
But one nutritionist and fitness expert has come out with a simple solution: put down your phone. According to Sal Di Stefano – who recently sat down to chat with US nutritionist Max Lugavere for his The Genius Life podcast – our phone can cause provide so much distraction to us, that we’re actually not realising how many calories we’re putting into our body.
“Non-distracted eating actually results in us eating fewer calories than we tend to consume. When you’re distracted, you eat way more. 15% more calories”, he relates
Sal goes on to say that when we count the calories we consume “it mentally starts to get very challenging” – indeed, this is something this writer can vouch for having been on a calorie counting diet for several months now. However, Sal argues that if you were to tell someone to sit down and eat whatever they wanted, but the only condition is they can’t go on their phone or watch TV, “they won’t feel deprived.”
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He further claims that clients of his that have stuck to this slightly more unusual method of dieting, have come to him after a few months and will notice fat loss.
“They’ll come to me and they’ll be like ‘I didn’t know my phone was making me fatter.'”
“It’s not necessarily your phone, it’s just the behaviours it encourages.”
“You think you’re eating like you normally do, but what you don’t realise, you’re eating fewer calories because you’re not distracted.”
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Sal’s comments are backed up by research from Harvard, which cited a report published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that ultimately found “Evidence indicates that attentive eating is likely to influence food intake, and incorporation of attentive-eating principles into interventions provides a novel approach to aid weight loss and maintenance without the need for conscious calorie counting.”
So, it’s not necessarily a case of put down the fork, but put down the phone, instead.