Give This Gift Early

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, according to a new study from the University of Liverpool. Chewing a stick of gum also resulted in 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.

This marks the fourth week of the Lean Plate Club Holiday Challenge. Even if you're not already participating in the challenge, it's not too late to join. The goal is simple: Maintain your weight from now until New Year's. Doing that puts you ahead of the curve, since a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that overweight and obese people put on as much as five pounds during the holidays. (You can find more information and resources about the challenge at http://www.leanplateclub.com/ , where you can also subscribe to the free, weekly Lean Plate Club e-mail newsletter.)

Liverpool psychologist Marion Hetherington and her colleagues recruited 60 healthy men and women, aged 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 33.

During the study, which was supported by the Wrigley gum company, participants visited the researchers four times. 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. While that doesn't sound like much, it adds up to 252 calories a week -- about the amount found in a thin slice of pecan pie or several Christmas cookies.

Men and women benefited equally, the researchers reported in October at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO). 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 in an abstract presented at the meeting.

But chewing gum seemed to control best the craving for afternoon sweets rather than for salty snacks, the study found. "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 notes.

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."

Whether you make that gum regular or sugar-free doesn't appear to matter. Most of the gum used in the study was sugar-free. One stick of standard gum has about 10 calories, while a stick of sugar-free has about one to three, depending on the brand. There has been some question about whether sugar substitutes might increase hunger, but the latest findings from this and other studies suggest that they don't.

Here are some other ways for you to help maintain your weight as the holiday season continues on its merry way:

Add a first course to lunch and dinner. Make it a leafy salad with low-fat dressing or a bowl of broth-based soup. These high-volume foods contain fiber and/or water, which helps dilute their calories. Eating them first helps fool your brain and stomach into feeling full so that you eat less of the main course, according to multiple studies conducted at Penn State.

Fidget. It won't make you fit, but it helps to burn a couple hundred extra calories throughout the day. Studies suggest that fidgeting while sitting can raise metabolic rate as much as 46 percent, up to 69 percent while standing.

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

Join the Lean Plate Club online chat from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. today athttp://www.washingtonpost.comor e-mail Sally Squires atleanplateclub@washpost.comanytime.