Walking whilst Eating may Trigger Over-Eating

09 Sep 2015 --- Many people eat whilst on the move especially those with busy work schedules. But new research from the University of Surrey has shown that eating whilst walking could actually trigger weight gain in dieters.  The research was published in the Journal of Health Psychology and suggested that people who ate whilst walking were more likely to eat more later on in the day. Studies have already shown that eating whilst watching TV or looking at a computer may lead to over-eating, but walking is even worse it seems.

Most studies looking at the effects of eating while being distracted by other activities look at the effect of concurrent food intake, but this study looked instead at future intake later in the day.  The researchers hypothesized that the reason for increased intake later on could be “because walking is a powerful form of distraction which disrupts our ability to process the impact eating has on our hunger, or it may be because walking, even just around a corridor, can be regarded as a form of exercise which justifies overeating later on as a form of reward."

The researchers used a fixed meal intake during a period of distraction to measure food intake. A total of 60 female students were categorized as dieters or non-dieters. The participants were each randomly assigned to eat a cereal bar under one of three different conditions. One group watched a 5-minute clip of a TV program while eating, another group had to walk along a corridor while eating and the final group ate while sat with a friend and having a conversation.

After eating the cereal bar, the participants completed a brief questionnaire about it before being asked to take part in an unsupervised taste test. They were then given different foods, and were instructed to rate the foods according to how much they liked them and told to eat as much as they wanted. Dieters who ate their cereal bar while walking around went on to eat more snacks during the taste test. In particular, the researchers found that they ate around five times more chocolate than other participants.

However, due to the closeness of the experiment to the time when the cereal bar had been eaten, there may be discrepancies in the results. For example, the reason the walkers may have eaten more directly after eating the bar could be that they had absorbed less of the bar than their controls, as digestion is impaired when another activity is also present. Lead researcher Professor Ogden said, “the participants walked around the corridor for 7 minutes and it wasn’t a strenuous activity”, but acknowledged that this could have had an effect and that if the participants had had time to rest between tests, the results may have been different. The researchers suggest that further research is needed to assess whether walking can trigger overeating in the longer term.