Health: Food news.

Eating Personality

People struggling with their weight tend to share certain characteristics, says Robert Kushner of Northwestern University's Wellness Institute. He and his colleagues surveyed 335 people and identified several personality traits that correlated with unhealthy eating and exercise habits, such as focusing on helping others rather than improving one's own health, talking about losing weight without taking action, and being a high achiever who is never satisfied with one's own progress. Identifying and counteracting these tendencies (for instance, by setting achievable goals and noting small successes) is as important to long-term weight loss, Kushner concludes, as diet and exercise.

The Freezer Diet

The Freezer Diet Frozen entrees can help people lose weight by regulating their portions. In a University of Illinois study, one group of dieters ate a frozen entree (an Uncle Ben's bowl of pasta or rice, vegetables, and meat or seafood) for lunch and dinner plus two cups of vegetables, two cups of nonfat dairy, two servings of fruit, and three servings of whole grains per day. Another group chose their foods according to the Food Guide Pyramid. (Both groups also had small amounts of oils, sweets, and alcohol.) After eight weeks, the frozen-entree group lost 6.5 percent of their weight, versus 4.2 percent for the self-selecting group. Frozen entrees like those in the study (with 300 to ...