Investigation of a New Diet for the Treatment of Obesity in the NHS

Change in body weight will be measured from patient group session 1 (week 0) to the end of study (week 52)

Measurement of whether the dietary intervention changes the rate at which your body burns calories

Percentage body fat as measured using bio-impedance weighing scales

Although baseline data were recorded by the study team, inter-individual differences at the same timepoint indicated recorded measure of insufficient reliability to continue to record/report.

Measuring patients' blood pressure to see if it changes

Change in blood sugar levels measured using the blood test marker for diabetes (glycemic control) called HbA1c

Three Factor Hunger Questionnaire:

The TFEQ is a 51-item questionnaire completed by study participants to measure three areas (or factors) related to eating behaviour: cognitive restraint of eating (score 0 to 20), disinhibition (score 0 to 16), and hunger (score 0 to 15).

The higher the score the greater the level of restrained eating, disinhibited eating and subjective feelings of/predisposition to feeling hungry.

The DEBQ questionnaire completed by study participants to assess eating behaviour across three domains:

Emotional eating - eating in response to negative emotions External eating - eating in response to external cues such as the sight or smell of food Restrained eating - the conscious limiting of food intake The DEBQ consists of 33 items grouped into the three categories: emotional eating (13 items), external eating (10 items) and restrained eating (10 items) Participant responses to each item range from 1 (never) to 5 (very often) with higher scores indicating a greater endorsement of the eating behaviour described in the question.

The lowest total score for the DEBQ (combined for all three categories) is 33 indicating no behaviours relating to the three domains eating and the highest score is 165 indicating very frequent behaviours relating to the three domains. A lower score indicates healthy eating behaviours, a higher score indicates more problematic eating behaviours.

This secondary outcome measures will be assessed using the Short Form-36 (SF-36) questionnaire.

SF-36 is a participant completed questionnaire consisting of 36 questions relating to quality of life and well-being.

Questions cover the following eight domains:

Physical functioning Role limitation due to physical health Role limitation due to emotional problems Energy/fatigue Emotional wellbeing Social functioning Pain General Health

Each of these domains is scored from 0 to 100 with a higher score indicating better quality of life and well-being.

Patient drop out will be recorded. Drop out will be defined as a patient expressing the wish to drop out either verbally or in writing. A patient will also be considered to have dropped out of the study if they do not attend patient group sessions or fail to attend study visits without providing the investigators with an explanation for their non-attendance. Drop-out rate will be used as a surrogate marker of the acceptability of the intervention to patients.