White hair chronicles XVI - Lose weight with emails?

The holidays always tend to add more pounds to everyone. Then by the start of the new year, among the resolutions always made is to lose weight. Early this year, I did the GM seven-day diet. I lost close to three kilos. I regained some of it but I am still lighter than last year.

Now in anticipation of holiday binges, I am trying to keep my intake down. There's a wellness website that claims people might drop more preholiday diet pounds if they tap into this simple technology: e-mail.

In the unspecified study, dieters who received support, and motivation through e-mails dropped more weight than the dieters who hadn't received cyber support. The website says besides the encouragement sent by weight loss counselors, the e-mails also provided tips on how to cut calories and exercise more. The website also urged dieters to use an online message board and weight loss diary. These tools together helped dieters stay on track and lose more weight, it claims.

The website further claims - "In the study, it didn't matter if the e-mails were written and sent by a real person or automated -- they still helped turbocharge people's weight loss in the first half of the 6-month study. But by study's end, the human-generated e-mails had an edge. So your best bet may be to find an online weight loss program that includes e-mail counseling, or a like-minded friend who's willing to shoot you a weekly message, and vice versa."

I'm not so sure about those claims. They did not mention where the study was published. It may just be a come-on for people to sign-up with their on-line service. If e-mail helps, good. Just don't overdo it. I'm sure there are studies that show the sedentary lifestyle brought by clicking your time away on the Internet brings on the pounds.

It's simple:

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