News March 2007
Calorie Check Effective For Weight Loss
It has been stated many times to all those who want to loose weight
that for effective results dieting and exercising should be used
in conjunction.
Not so, says new research published in the Journal of Clinical
Endocrinology & Metabolism, which reveals that dieting alone
is as effective as dieting plus exercise. The key is in the calories
and the study shows that calories can be lost effectively by either
dietary restrictions or exercise.
“For weight
loss to occur, an individual needs to maintain a difference
between the number of calories they consume everyday and the number
of calories they burn through metabolism and physical activity,”
says Leanne Redman, Ph.D., first author of the study and clinical
research fellow at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in
Baton Rouge, La. “What we found was that it did not matter
whether a reduction in calories was achieved through diet or burned
everyday through exercise.”
The researchers conducted a randomized, controlled trial to examine
the effects of diet alone or diet plus exercise in overweight but
otherwise healthy study participants. The participants were divided
into three groups. One group only reduced caloric intake. A second
group reduced caloric intake by a smaller amount, but included exercise
as part of their program, and a third set of participants served
as a control group. They were all followed for a six-month period.
At the end of the study, the reduced caloric intake group and
the group that combined a smaller amount of reduced calories with
exercise had similar results. Members of both groups lost roughly
10 percent of their body weight, 24 percent of their fat mass and
27 percent of their abdominal visceral fat, which is fat buried
deep in the abdomen and linked to heart disease risk.
Some studies have shown that people with “apple shaped”
bodies, or more fat distributed at the waistline may have a higher
risk of heart disease than people with “pear shaped”
bodies, or more fat at the thigh or hips.
Thus it has been noted that the best method to point out the risk
for cardiovascular disease is to see the shape of a person’s
body.
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