What’s New?
One can acquire a 6th sense for calorie balance through implicit learning.
Why is this important?
Because diets and calorie counting don’t work.
The solution?
LiLo’s program for implicit learning trains a 6th sense for one’s daily calorie balance.
The 6th Sense
The calorie balance is what drives a person’s body weight. It is the sum of input (food calories) and output (exercise calories). It is what you see on the scale, but usually too late.
Now imagine that you have a kind of 6th sense for your daily calorie balance. A 6th sense with which you control your daily eating and exercise behavior in such a way that you get your weight under control, whether you want to maintain it or reduce it. Without having to torture yourself with diets or calorie counting.
The idea behind this is as old as mankind itself and is called implicit learning.
You know it from cycling and swimming. You don’t learn either from a book, but only by practicing. The painful and instructive feedback when you’ve done something wrong always hits you immediately.
And that’s how we do it with training the 6th sense for caloric balance, too.
Users only have to do two things: weigh themselves once a day (after getting up), and at the end of each day they give a 1-click estimate of whether exercise and diet during the current day will move the needle on the bathroom scale up or down the following day.
The scale automatically transfers the weight data to LiLo’s file via WLAn. Users receive visual feedback every day. From the 8th day onwards, our algorithms show how good their intuition really is. And where their weight trend is going.
Typically, it takes about 4-6 weeks until they have acquired a strong 6th sense for their calorie balance. And with it, they henceforth control their weight.
Because what happens is this: Everyone reacts a little differently to the same diet and exercise. Through the daily feedback on weight development, users initially learn subconsciously (implicitly) what works for them and how. This then very quickly turns into concrete knowledge and competence for one’s own metabolism. LiLo’s algorithms are also trained to recognize, from daily weight fluctuations, in which direction the weight career will go.
The Justification
What comes as a surprise to most people surprised us, too, initially: weight trends can be identified from daily weight fluctuations. This fact is not only documented in the literature [1]. We have also tested it ourselves, and perfected LiLo’s algorithms over the past 8 years.
Most importantly, the daily “game” of predicting tomorrows weight change quickly becomes a habit. Thanks to the daily feedback, and not least because LiLo makes this training of the 6th sense so effortless and unobtrusive.
Training one’s calorie balance is particularly relevant for younger adults:
First, preventing overweight and obesity is a lot easier than reducing weight.
And, secondly, without effective countermeasures, today’s 30-year-olds (millenials) will gain an average of 17 kg in the next 20 years [2]. Women are particularly affected, one in two of whom will become obese.
That alone is a revelation for the more than 100 diets listed on Wikipedia. But also for the apps for losing weight and counting calories.
Reason enough to develop the 6th sense for calorie balance.
References
[1] Turicchi J, O’Driscoll R, Horgan G, Duarte C, Palmeira AL, Larsen SC, et al. Weekly, seasonal and holiday body weight fluctuation patterns among individuals engaged in a European multi-centre behavioural weight loss maintenance intervention. PLoS One 2020;15:1–19. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0232152.
[2] Brown WJ, Flores TR, Keating SE, Mielke GI. Trajectories and determinants of weight gain in two cohorts of young adult women born 16 years apart. Int J Obes 2021;45:1553–64. doi:10.1038/s41366-021-00819-0.
