Is losing weight as simple as doing a 15-minute writing exercise? In a new study, women who wrote about their most important values, like close relationships or religion, lost more weight over the next few months than women who didn't. "We have this need to feel self-integrity (,)," says Christine Logel of the University of Waterloo. "When something threatens your sense that you're a good person, like failing a test, we can buffer  that self-integrity by reminding ourselves how much we love our children, for example". For this study, the researchers recruited 45 female undergraduates, of whom 58% were overweight. Each woman was weighed, and was then given a list ofimportant values, like creativity, music or relationships with friends and family members. Each woman ranked the values in order of how important they were to her. Then half the women were told to write for 15 minutes about the value that was most important to her. The other half, a control group, were told to write about why a value far down on their list might be important to someone else. The women came back months later to be weighed again. Women who had written about an important value lost an average of 3.41 pounds, while women in the control group gained an average of 2.76 pounds. "How we feel about ourselves can have a big effect," Logel says. Maybe when one of the women who wrote about an important value went home that night, she felt good about herself and didn't eat to make herself feel better. Over a few months, that could make a real difference in her life, How can a 15-minute writing exercise ofimportant values affect people?
They will feel proud of themselves and gain weight gradually. They may feel good about themselves and then eat less than usual. They may continue writing and decide to become a professional writer. They will never have meals at night to make themselves lose weight.