Category: Weight Loss

The technique helps to break down fats, effectively melting them away.

The best way to shed belly fat is through exercise, a study finds.

More belly fat is lost by people doing exercise than those taking medications designed for weight loss.

A molecule called interleukin-6 is released by exercise.

This helps to break down fats, effectively melting them away.

Dr Anne-Sophie Wedell-Neergaard, the study’s first author, said:

“The take home for the general audience is ‘do exercise’.

We all know that exercise promotes better health, and now we also know that regular exercise training reduces abdominal fat mass and thereby potentially also the risk of developing cardio-metabolic diseases.”

The research included 53 people who exercised for 45 minutes, several times a week.

The results showed that belly fat was reduced by an average of 8 percent in those who did exercise.

Some people were given a drug that blocks the action of interleukin-6.

The results showed that this group put on weight, suggesting that interleukin-6 is important for weight loss.

Dr Wedell-Neergaard said:

“To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that interleukin-6 has a physiological role in regulating visceral fat mass in humans.”

Unfortunately, there is no food or combination of foods, that have been found to get rid of belly fat.

However, diet and exercise can both help.

Eating healthily is also beneficial for general health, reducing the risk of dementia, cancer and other diseases.

Dr Wedell-Neergaard said:

“It is important to stress that when you start exercising, you may increase body weight due to increased muscle mass.

So, in addition to measuring your overall body weight, it would be useful, and maybe more important, to measure waist circumference to keep track of the loss of visceral fat mass and to stay motivated.”

The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism (Wedell-Neergaard et al., 2018).

This vital weight loss technique is nothing to do with diet and exercise.

Learning to love your body, however it looks, can triple weight loss efforts, research finds.

Dieters in the study learned to be less concerned about their size and weight and other people’s opinions of them.

They were also encouraged to think that how their body looks is not as important as they think.

Happily, the researchers found, people with an improved body image, automatically eat more healthily.

The study shows that hating your own body is one of the biggest barriers to weight loss.

It is well-known that people who are overweight often have body image problems.

Overcoming these problems — especially worrying about what other people think — is hugely beneficial to weight loss.

For the study, 239 overweight women followed a standard program of diet and exercise for one year.

Half were given a special course designed to improve their body image.

This included sessions on the emotional aspects of losing weight.

This is because some overweight people tend towards emotional eating.

Emotional eating means that negative moods trigger bouts of eating to feel better, rather than eating to satiate hunger.

The women were also encouraged to love their bodies, whatever its size and shape.

The results showed that those who improved their body image lost an average of 7 percent — more than triple the weight loss of the control group.

Dr Pedro Teixeira, study co-author, said:

“Body image problems are very common amongst overweight and obese people, often leading to comfort eating and more rigid eating patterns, and are obstacles to losing weight.

Our results showed a strong correlation between improvements in body image, especially in reducing anxiety about other people’s opinions, and positive changes in eating behavior.

From this we believe that learning to relate to your body in healthier ways is an important aspect of maintaining weight loss and should be addressed in every weight control program.”

The study was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (Carraça et al., 2011).

People who ate at this time were half as likely to be hungry afterwards.

Although the common advice for losing weight is avoid snacking, little research has looked at the impact of late eating on appetite and body weight regulation.

Body weight is regulated by factors such as the number of calories we burn, structural changes in fat cells, and regulation of energy intake.

A study has found that the time of eating greatly influences hunger and appetite, molecular pathways in adipose tissues, and amounts of energy that our body needs.

Professor Frank Scheer, the study’s lead author, said:

“We wanted to test the mechanisms that may explain why late eating increases obesity risk.

Previous research by us and others had shown that late eating is associated with increased obesity risk, increased body fat, and impaired weight loss success.

We wanted to understand why.”

Dr Nina Vujović, the study’s first author, said:

“In this study, we asked, ‘Does the time that we eat matter when everything else is kept consistent?

And we found that eating four hours later makes a significant difference for our hunger levels, the way we burn calories after we eat, and the way we store fat.”

Early eating vs. late eating

The study examined the outcome of early eating and late eating on 16 overweight and obese people.

Participants had to complete an early eating protocol and a late eating protocol during the in-laboratory stays.

The early eating protocol included breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a 4-hour break between each and the last meal consumed 6 hours and 40 minutes before bedtime.

Meals for the the late eating protocol were similar to the early eating protocol but subjects skipped breakfast and had lunch, dinner, and supper which was 2 hours and 30 minutes before bedtime.

During the stay participants blood samples were taken, body temperature, energy expenditure, hunger and appetite were recorded.

Samples of adipose tissue were collected to see how meal timing affects molecular pathways in fat cells and how fat is stored in the body.

This enabled the team to compare gene expression profiles between the two eating conditions and the results showed that late eating changed the lipid metabolism pathways.

They found that eating late alerted appetite-regulating hormones: ghrelin levels went up while leptin levels went down, resulting in more hunger.

Also, subjects burned less calories and had elevated levels of adipogenesis (formation of fat cells) and reduction of lipolysis (a process that fat breaks down).

These findings show a direct relation between late eating and increased risk of developing obesity.

Professor Scheer said:

“This study shows the impact of late versus early eating.

Here, we isolated these effects by controlling for confounding variables like caloric intake, physical activity, sleep, and light exposure, but in real life, many of these factors may themselves be influenced by meal timing.

In larger scale studies, where tight control of all these factors is not feasible, we must at least consider how other behavioral and environmental variables alter these biological pathways underlying obesity risk.”

The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism (Vujović et al., 2022).

Compared to a Mediterranean diet, this diet works better for weight loss and blood glucose levels.

A head-to-head comparison of the vegan diet with the Mediterranean diet shows that the vegan diet is superior for weight loss.

A low-fat vegan diet can cause weight loss, improve body composition, reduce cholesterol levels, and lower blood sugar levels more than a Mediterranean diet.

A study put a group of overweight adults on either a Mediterranean diet or low-fat vegan diet for 16 weeks.

The low-fat vegan diet was completely free from animal products and consisted of whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes.

They also received vitamin B12 at a dosage of 500 µg per day during the entire study period.

The energy content of the vegan diet was from carbohydrates (75 percent), protein (15 percent), and fat (10 percent).

The Mediterranean diet plan was similar to the PREDIMED study (Prevention with Mediterranean Diet).

It consisted of low-fat dairy, legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts or seeds, extra virgin olive oil, whole-grain cereals, eggs, and fish but saturated fats and red meat were avoided or limited to one serving per week.

All participants continued their routine exercises and didn’t need to change their regular medication unless told by their doctors.

Here is a summary of findings:

• The Mediterranean diet didn’t cause any changes in weight but when participants followed the vegan diet they lost 13 pounds (6 kg).
• The low-fat vegan diet led to a greater reductions of fat mass by 7.5 pounds (3.4 kg).
• The vegan diet also caused a 315 cm3 reduction in visceral fat.
• The vegan diet led to a reduction of total cholesterol and LDL (“bad” cholesterol) by 18.7mg/dL and 15.3 mg/dL respectively whereas the Mediterranean diet didn’t cause any changes in cholesterol levels.
• Both diets caused lowered blood pressure with the Mediterranean diet being more effective than the vegan diet, 6.0 mm Hg compared to 3.2 mm Hg.

Dr Hana Kahleova, the study’s co-author, said:

“Previous studies have suggested that both Mediterranean and vegan diets improve body weight and cardiometabolic risk factors, but until now, their relative efficacy had not been compared in a randomized trial.

We decided to test the diets head to head and found that a vegan diet is more effective for both improving health markers and boosting weight loss.”

The researchers suggest that the weight loss from the vegan diet is related to its fewer calories, higher fibre, and lower fat intake.

Dr Neal Barnard, the study’s author, said:

“While many people think of the Mediterranean diet as one of the best ways to lose weight, the diet actually crashed and burned when we put it to the test.

In a randomized, controlled trial, the Mediterranean diet caused no weight loss at all.

The problem seems to be the inclusion of fatty fish, dairy products, and oils.

In contrast, a low-fat vegan diet caused significant and consistent weight loss.”

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (Barnard et al., 2021).

Belly fat reduced by 11 percent in just one week.

A very low calorie or ‘crash’ diet can lead to losing 5 percent of body weight in just one week, research finds.

The diet can also reduce belly fat by 11 percent across the first week.

People in the study went on a crash diet, involving eating just 600 to 800 calories per day.

This is around one-third, or less, of the recommended daily intake of calories.

To achieve this calorie intake, people often replace normal meals with shakes, soups and bars that are specially formulated.

In addition, crash diets involve drinking a lot of water, milk and possibly taking fibre supplements.

However, people with heart problems should be wary of rapid weight loss as it can reduce heart function initially, the researchers found.

Dr Jennifer Rayner, the study’s first author, said:

“Crash diets, also called meal replacement programmes, have become increasingly fashionable in the past few years.

These diets have a very low calorie content of 600 to 800 kcal per day and can be effective for losing weight, reducing blood pressure, and reversing diabetes, but the effects on the heart have not been studied until now.”

The study included 21 obese people who ate just 600 to 800 calories per day.

After one week they had lost 6 percent of their body weight, 11 percent of their visceral fat and 42 percent of their liver fat.

Set against this, fat content in the heart had increased by 44 percent, which led to a deterioration in heart function.

After the full eight weeks of study, though, heart function had returned to normal.

Dr Rayner explained:

“The metabolic improvements with a very low calorie diet, such as a reduction in liver fat and reversal of diabetes, would be expected to improve heart function.

Instead, heart function got worse in the first week before starting to improve.

The sudden drop in calories causes fat to be released from different parts of the body into the blood and be taken up by the heart muscle.

The heart muscle prefers to choose between fat or sugar as fuel and being swamped by fat worsens its function.

After the acute period in which the body is adjusting to dramatic calorie restriction, the fat content and function of the heart improved.”

Dr Rayner advises checking with your physician before starting a intense diet if you have a heart problem:

“If you have heart problems, you need to check with your doctor before embarking on a very low calorie diet or fasting.

People with a cardiac problem could well experience more symptoms at this early time point, so the diet should be supervised.

Otherwise healthy people may not notice the change in heart function in the early stages.

But caution is needed in people with heart disease.”

The study was presented at CMR 2018 in Barcelona (Rayner et al., 2018).

Two of the most popular diets were compared by researchers.

Two of the most popular weight loss techniques are equally effective, recent research concludes.

Both continuous dieting and intermittent fasting are effective and lead to the same amount of weight loss, the study finds.

People on either diet lost around 6 percent of their body weight across six months.

Continuous dieting involves cutting down on calories each day by around the same amount — this is a classic diet.

Intermittent fasting involves dieting heavily for a period and then stopping for a period.

The periods of fasting and eating normally vary:

• one diet recommends 5 days of fasting followed by two days off,
• another involves 16 days fasting, followed by 8 days off,
• and another recommends fasting on alternate days.

Continuous diets may be easier for people to stick to, though, this study found.

For the research, 100 obese adults were split into three groups.

One group reduced their calorie intake by 75 percent one day and then feasted on an extra 25 percent of their normal intake of calories the next day.

The other group followed a ‘normal’ diet, by just restricting their calorie intake by 25 percent every day.

Effectively, both groups ate the same amount of calories.

The results showed that both groups lost the same amount of weight compared to a third control group.

The study’s authors conclude:

“The results of this randomized clinical trial demonstrated that alternate-day fasting did not produce superior adherence, weight loss, weight maintenance or improvements in risk indicators for cardiovascular disease compared with daily calorie restriction.”

However, people found the traditional continuous diet easier than intermittent fasting, so this may prove a better option for many.

The authors write that:

“…these findings suggest that alternate-day fasting may be less sustainable in the long term, compared with daily calorie restriction, for most obese individuals.”

The study was published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine (Trepanowski et al., 2017).

Up to 50 percent of people may have a deficiency in this vitamin.

Taking vitamin D supplements can boost weight loss, help shed belly fat and control blood sugar levels, research finds.

Previous studies have shown that people who are dieting lose 20 pounds more when they have high vitamin D levels.

Vitamin D at higher levels in the body is also associated with burning belly fat.

One study has shown that drinking milk, which contains calcium and vitamin D, can double weight loss.

Up to 50 percent of people may have a vitamin D deficiency.

A deficiency in this vitamin has been linked to increased inflammation in the body.

Foods rich in vitamin D include eggs, oily fish like salmon, mushrooms, dairy and foods that are fortified with it, including cereals and juices.

The current study included 121 women with vitamin D deficiency and pre-diabetes.

Half were given vitamin D supplementation of 60,000 IU once per week over eight weeks.

After their vitamin D levels were returned to normal, they were given 200 IU per day to keep them at a healthy level.

The other half were given a placebo.

The results showed that women taking vitamin D lost more belly fat and demonstrated better glucose regulation.

The study’s authors explain the results:

“In this carefully designed randomized control trial of 18 months duration, we show significant decrease in the following; FBG [fasting blood glucose], 2-h blood glucose post OGTT [oral glucose tolerance test], HbA1c, and truncal subcutaneous fat [belly fat] (as measured by skinfolds) with vitamin D intervention.”

Vitamin D helps the body to absorb calcium.

Higher calcium levels appear to reduce the desire for food.

A deficiency in calcium, though, can drive the appetite as a way of obtaining more of the essential mineral.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Bhatt et al., 2019).

Study participants lost weight without dieting or making other lifestyle changes.

Taking a vitamin D supplement is repeatedly linked to weight loss by studies.

People taking vitamin D lose weight without dieting or making other lifestyle changes.

Adding in dieting and exercise can help to boost weight loss even more.

One study has shown that people drinking more milk, which contains vitamin D and calcium, can double weight loss.

The new study included 50 overweight and obese women.

Half of them received doses of vitamin D equivalent to almost 10,000 IU per day over six weeks.

The study’s authors write:

“Previous studies had shown that the vitamin D deficiency is more prevalent in obese people and there was an inverse association between vitamin D, body mass index, and weight.”

The other half received a placebo that they were told was vitamin D, but was in fact inert.

The researchers measured people’s weight, waist and hip circumference, cholesterol and other biological markers, before and after supplementation.

The results showed that people taking vitamin D lost 3.5 pounds after taking vitamin D for six weeks.

The study’s authors explain the results:

“The findings of this double-blind clinical trial study in obese and overweight women aged 20–40 years showed that supplementation of the vit D with dozes 50,000 IU/w for 6 weeks reduced significantly the mean BMI [body mass index], weight and on the other hand, it increased significantly the level of vit D in comparison with the control group.”

The average weight loss was around 3.5 pounds in the vitamin D group compared with no change in the control group.

Around half the world’s population is deficient in vitamin D.

Foods that are rich in vitamin D include oily fish and eggs, but most people get their vitamin D from the action of sunlight on the skin.

The study was published in the International Journal of Preventative Medicine (Khosravi et al., 2019).