Keeping off those holiday pounds

When the holiday cookies, sugar plums, pie and other treats prove especially tempting this year, give yourself an early gift: Unwrap a stick of chewing gum.

Not only can chewing gum help suppress your appetite, but it also appears to cut the craving for sweets, a study has found. The result is a slight, but measurable, decline in calorie consumption, just the thing that could help you maintain your weight at a time of year when many people gain a few unwanted pounds.

University of Liverpool psychologist Marion Hetherington and her colleagues recruited 60 healthy men and women, age 18 to 40, to test the effects of chewing gum on post-lunch appetite and snacking. Participants ranged in size from a very lean body mass index (BMI) of 17 to an obese BMI of 33.

During the study, which was supported by the Wrigley gum company, participants visited the lab on four separate days. On two visits, they chewed no gum before eating either a sweet or a savory snack. On the other two visits, they chewed gum then ate the snacks.

The study found that chewing gum cut snacking by about 36 calories compared with not chewing gum. Although that doesn’t sound like much, over a week, it adds up to 252 calories -- about the amount found in a thin slice of pecan pie or several Christmas cookies.

Both men and women benefited equally from chewing gum, the researchers said. Afternoon hunger ratings “were also significantly lower for the chewing gum group compared with the no-gum group,” Hetherington and her colleague Emma Boyland wrote.

Chewing gum seemed to control best the craving for afternoon sweets rather than for salty snacks. “This may be due to the sweet flavor of the gums having a greater effect on decreasing craving for sweet compared to salty snacks,” the team noted.

The results suggest that “chewing gum may curb the desire to eat and lower energy intake from snacks after lunch,” Hetherington and Boyland concluded. “Chewing gum could be a useful tool to suppress appetite and reduce food intake as part of a strategy for weight management.”

Just remember not to pop it or blow bubbles in front of others. If you’re concerned about cavities, make it sugarless. (A stick of regular gum has 10 calories, while sugar-free has about 1 to 3.) Although there has been some question about whether the sugar substitute aspartame might increase hunger, the latest findings suggest that it doesn’t.

Here are some other ideas that will help you maintain your weight:

* Add a first course to lunch and dinner. Just make it a leafy salad with low-fat dressing or a bowl of broth-based soup. These high-volume foods contain fiber and water, and eating them first helps fool your brain and stomach into feeling full. You might then eat less of the main course at the meal.

* Fidget. It won’t make you fit, but it helps to burn extra calories throughout the day. How many calories? Studies suggest that fidgeting while sitting can raise metabolic rate as much as 46%; up to 69% while standing.

In one recent study by Carol Boozer and Kuan Zhang at the New York Obesity Research Center in New York City, seven slightly overweight participants, with a BMI of 26, wore a device for 23 hours per day for a week to measure all their activities. Boozer and Zhang found that just 97 minutes per day of fidgeting -- moving one foot or another, for example -- burned 200 calories per day.

About 2 1/2 hours of fidgeting while sitting or standing burned 300 calories -- “enough to affect energy balance and contribute tremendously to maintain body weight,” the authors report.