NoHoW included a European survey to learn about patterns of weight loss, what people do to maintain their weight loss, and where people most often need support in preventing weight regain. The survey targeted people who had previously lost weight, and collected a wide range of information, including weight loss goals, motivation for weight loss, socioeconomic factors, and demographic information. The results of the survey confirmed that people need support with motivation, self-regulating their behaviours and regulating their emotions.
In the UK, Denmark and Portugal, we completed in-depth interviews with people who had recently lost weight to know what motivated them to lose weight, how they managed emotions and stress and regulated their diet. We learned that many different things from the interviews – for example, short- and long-term weight loss maintainers had different strategies to regulate their food intake. Long-term maintainers had formed routines that allowed them to be more flexible, but also provided them with stronger self-control when buying and storing food and eating at social gatherings. Short-term maintainers often displayed a ‘weight loss mind-set’, had less flexibility, planned more and focused on avoiding certain behaviours.
NoHoW developed an IT-based Toolkit, with a set of mobile apps, web-based tools and inputs from other technologies, such as smart scales and activity and sleep trackers. Through the TK, users learned behaviour change techniques that could help them maintain their weight loss. Users could also access useful information about their own weight, activity levels and sleep, helping them to set goals and monitor their own progress.
The NoHoW Toolkit was tested through a randomised controlled trial in the United Kingdom, Portugal and Denmark with over 1,600 adult men and women with overweight/obesity who had successfully lost more than 5% of their body weight in the past 12 months, and who wanted to maintain the lost weight in the long term. Participants were randomly allocated to three intervention groups and one control group, and were given different kinds of support, including motivation, goal setting and coping plans, emotion regulation and stress management through the TK. Everyone was asked to weigh themselves regularly and track activity and sleep through an activity tracker. Measures of weight and health were completed at baseline and after 6, 12 and 18 months, as were questionnaires related to psychological measures and the TK itself.
Overall, the trial found that self-management and/or emotion regulation delivered digitally by the TK was not effective in supporting WLM. A clinically small effect was observed in the subgroup of men who received motivational support, and few and inconsistent effects were seen on metabolic biomarkers. Thus, effective scalable methods for sustained WLM are still missing and our knowledge about how to help people prevent weight gain relapse remains insufficient.
If the TK had worked, there were plans to develop commercial services and products. In light of the trial results, commercialisation of the Toolkit as a whole is no longer planned. However, the results of NoHoW will have an impact on future research and have already sparked new research initiatives, such as the development of Energy Balance tracking technology by the University of Leeds and the use of Big Data analysis in person-centred approaches to behaviour change at the University of Lisbon.It will also be possible for researchers to request access to anonymised NoHoW data for future research (
https://easo.org/the-nohow-dataset/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)).
To date, the project has produced eleven open access publications with more submitted and in preparation. NoHoW held project symposia at the European Congress on Obesity in 2017, 2018 and 2019, with a further symposium planned for 2020, and the project was presented at more than 35 scientific conferences and events. The project also co-hosted a Final Workshop with the Portuguese Society for Patients with Obesity to educate healthcare professionals about the management of weight regain and sharing NoHoW results. Videos and other engaging content are available on the project website (
http://nohow.eu/media/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)).
