Want to lose weight? A boring, repetitious meal plan might help, researchers say.

Sticking to the same sort of meals day in and day out appears to help people drop more pounds, researchers reported in the journal Health Psychology.

Folks who followed routine eating patterns – repeating many of the same foods, keeping their calorie intake steady – lost more weight over three months than those with a more varied diet, researchers found.

“Maintaining a healthy diet in today’s food environment requires constant effort and self-control,” said lead researcher Charlotte Hagerman, a social/health psychologist with the Oregon Research Institute in Springfield, Oregon.

“Creating routines around eating may reduce that burden and make healthy choices feel more automatic,” she said in a news release.

For the study, researchers analyzed real-time food logs from 112 overweight or obese adults participating in a weight-loss program. The participants were asked to track everything they ate each day using a mobile app.

The research team measured how routine each person’s diet was, based on how their calorie intake fluctuated day to day and how their meal and snack choices varied over time.

Those who had a repetitious diet lost 6% of their body weight on average, compared with 4% lost among those whose diets were more varied.

Likewise, day-to-day calorie consistency was linked to successful weight loss. For every 100-calorie increase in daily fluctuation, people had about 0.6% lower weight loss.

The results suggest that simplifying food choices might help people build sustainable habits, researchers said.

“If we lived in a healthier food environment, we might encourage people to have as much variety in their diet as possible,” Hagerman said, noting that previous research has linked dietary variety to better health.

“However, our modern food environment is too problematic,” she said. “Instead, people may do best with a more repetitive diet that helps them consistently make healthier choices, even if they might sacrifice some nutritional variety.”