Could Watching a Virtual Dieter Help You to Lose Weight?

Video games are bad for your wellness, right? They cause you to stay inside (no sunny vitamin D for you), remain sedentary (no wellbeing-improving exercise) and snack on junk food (hello, weight gain). However, researchers at Temple University’s Centre for Obesity Research and Education, in Philadelphia, US, have found that watching a virtual model dieting and exercising could be the key to successful weight loss.

 

If you watch an avatar model in a virtual community, it could help you shed pounds in the real world as it teaches you healthy behaviours. According to Dr Melissa Napolitano, ‘This pilot study showed that you don’t have to be a gamer to use virtual reality to learn some important skills for weight loss, This small study suggests that virtual reality could be a promising new tool for building healthier habits.’ This isn’t the first study to show that using virtual reality to reinforce behaviour could be effective, but Dr Napolitano set out to establish whether it could be used to help people lose weight.

 

For the study, Dr Napolitano surveyed 128 overweight women, many of whom had never used a virtual reality game but had tried to lose weight during the last year. The survey showed that 88% of participants were willing to use a programme with an avatar, as they believed that it could help them visualise and implement healthy behaviours, such as taking a walk every day or picking healthy options when food shopping. The researchers then created such videos, which the women watched. Although the participants could not manipulate the avatar’s actions, they did pick out the skin colour and shape of the avatar to more closely resemble their own appearance.

 

Eight overweight women were then enrolled on a four-week pilot test to see if watching the videos could help them learn new skills that could lead to weight loss. They spent 15 minutes a week watching different DVDs, which featured an avatar demonstrating healthy weight loss behaviours. After the treatment, the women had lost an average of 3.5 pounds, which is fairly typical for traditional diet plans. Dr Napolitano commented, ‘This is just the first step to show that women, even those who are not gamers, are interested in an avatar-based technology to help them with a weight loss plan. We are excited by the potential of this technology as a scalable tool to help people learn the skills to be successful at weight loss over the long run.’

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