It’s an old weight-loss saying, reminding folks that diet is more
\nimportant than exercise when it comes to shedding excess pounds.
\nBut is that true for everyone?<\/p>\n
New research suggests there’s a category of “diet-resistant” people who need to work out and watch what they eat if they want to shed pounds.<\/p>\n
In fact, these folks should prioritize exercise, because it decreases their fat mass and boosts their muscles’ ability to burn calories, the Canadian study concluded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe found that the slow losers responded much better to exercise than the fast losers did,” said senior study author Mary-Ellen Harper. She is research chair of mitochondrial bioenergetics at the University of Ottawa.<\/p>\n
“We hope these findings will allow a better, more personalized approach for adults with obesity who are seeking to lose weight, and especially those individuals who have very great difficulties losing weight,” Harper said.<\/p>\n
She noted that previous research has shown that the ability of muscle cells to burn energy varies widely between people.<\/p>\n
People who struggle to lose weight tend to have very efficient muscle cells; these cells are very good at storing energy rather than burning it away, Harper said.<\/p>\n
In fact, sometimes a diet will slow down a person’s metabolism even more, said David Creel, a psychologist and registered dietitian in the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.<\/p>\n
“Their metabolism reacts to this lower calorie intake by becoming even more efficient,” Creel said. “They’re not going to respond as well because they’re just not burning as many calories.”<\/p>\n
To see if exercise could change that up, Harper and her colleagues mined clinical data from more than 5,000 people who’d participated in a low-calorie weight-loss program at Ottawa Hospital.<\/p>\n
The program restricted people to 900 calories a day, but there still was a group of people who lost weight at a much lower rate than others.<\/p>\n
From those records, the researchers matched 10 “diet-resistant” people with 10 “diet-sensitive” women, and had them all take part in a six-week exercise program. The participants were matched based on their age, weight and BMI, and told to eat as usual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s an old weight-loss saying, reminding folks that diet is more important than exercise when it comes to shedding excess pounds. But is that true for everyone? New research suggests there’s a category of “diet-resistant” people who need to work out and watch what they […]<\/p>\n
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