Around the world, there are doctors and researchers working to understand the way the body handles weight loss. They want to know how it reacts to food, why different foods are treated differently, and what you can do to help keep off the weight.

Here are six new international discoveries about weight gain and how it applies to you.

While none of them are groundbreaking, they are useful and will help you work towards losing weight.

The best benefit is they consist of habits you can work into a healthy lifestyle, and a healthy lifestyle is what you should be striving for.

Black tea is an important part of weight loss diet

Black and green tea change the ratio of bacteria in a stomach associated with losing weight. To make very wonky biology simpler, the tea stimulates the growth and production of metabolites and they affect the metabolism in your liver.

According to UCLA Professor Susanne Henning, head of the project, “Our new findings suggest that black tea, through a specific mechanism through the gut microbiome, may also contribute to good health and weight loss in humans.”

The research was originally published in the European Journal of Nutrition.

Take a break from your diet

Researchers at the University of Tasmania conducted a study of people who were on weight loss diets for 16 weeks. They had some of the people keep up with a continuous diet while others took a two-week break in the middle of diet.

What they discovered was that people who took the break fared much better than those who continuously dieted. They kept the weight off longer at the end of the diet and they lost more weight.

The findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity.

Stay away from fake sweeteners

I know you have probably heard this one before, but it’s worth repeating. In this study, scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital may have identified a reason why the artificial sweeteners don’t help weight loss.

Aspartame breaks down into phenylalanine, phenylalanine interferes with an enzyme that helps weight loss. The researcher's full report was published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism.

The best weight loss is steady, not slow

Scientists at Drexel University did a study of 183 people on a weight loss plan. What they discovered was that people who lost a consistent amount of weight early in the program, and on a regular basis, kept the weight off longer. This trait continued even as long as two years later.

According to Emily Feig, Ph.D., a researcher on the project, “Developing stable, repeatable behaviors related to food intake and weight loss early on in a weight control program is really important for maintaining changes over the long term.”

The study was published in the journal Obesity.

Consider taking probiotics

Researchers from the Department of Cardiology, Taizhou People's Hospital, Taizhou, China did a review of 25 weight loss studies.

The studies covered about 1900 people.

The scientists found that people who take probiotics lost more weight than those people who didn’t take them.

They also discovered that people who took more than one type of probiotic lost even more weight than those who used only one kind.

The results of the study were published in International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition.

Write about your weight loss journey

Again, you probably have heard this before but it’s further proof that this habit is powerful. Kaiser Permanente did a study of 1700 people participating in their weight loss programs.

They found that participants who kept food journals, writing down what they ate daily, lost twice as much weight as those people who didn’t write it down.

The researchers said the more often the journals were used, the better the weight loss.

That’s a big difference for a small amount of extra work.

Their findings were published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.