Key message: Take your dieting advice from the experts – not a health guru, sales rep or a popular Instagram account.

Action point: If you want to lose weight in a healthy way, join me for my next Community Cleanse, kicking off August 23rd – http://www.emmascommunitycleanse.com.au/

Want to know the most effective ways to lose weight? Then turn to the experts for advice. Here are six weight-loss tips backed by decades of science:

1. Dieting is more effective than exercise

couple jogging on beachDecreasing food intake is much more effective than increasing physical activity to achieve weight loss. Studies which have pitted exercise against diet have shown that participants tend to lose more weight by dieting alone than by exercise alone1.

This is because people tend to naturally compensate for the calories they expend. Firstly, exercise affects hunger and appetite hormones, making you feel noticeably hungrier after exercise. The other problem with exercise without dieting is that it’s simply tiring. If you are wiped out after exercise, you are more likely to rest afterwards.

2. There is no ‘miracle’ diet

There isn’t any evidence5 that one particular diet will work better with an individual’s specific metabolism. The truth is that all diets will work if you follow them for long enough.

3. All calories are created equal

A calorie is a calorie. For energy balance, it’s the number of calories that matters.

You can gain weight eating too much healthy food as well as unhealthy food6 – although it is a lot easier to overeat calories from junk food than healthy food.

But the source of calories matters for other reasons, including how they influence satiety. A Harvard study 7 has shown that ‘more nutritious’ means, among other things, the opportunity to fill up on fewer calories.

4. Exercise kickstarts an ‘inflexible’ metabolism

While exercise may not be as important for weight loss as calorie restriction, it’s important in another way: it begins to repair a broken metabolism.

Bed-rest studies conducted by NASA2 indicate that within a couple of days of non-activity, the metabolism becomes ‘inflexible’. Metabolic flexibility is the ability of the human body to switch from one fuel source to the next: from fats to carbs and carbs to fat.  When you have a flexible (healthy) metabolism, your body efficiently burns whatever kind of food you eat.

So what can you do to ramp up your metabolism? Evidence indicates that metabolism can pick up again through moving your body every day3. This is a large part of why exercise is critical in the maintenance phase, which is well known to be more difficult than the weight-loss phase.

5. You may have to work harder than other people

Though exercise can help correct a metabolism that’s been out of whack for a long time, the reality is that it may not ever go back to what it was before you gained weight.

So if you’ve been overweight or obese and you lose weight, maintaining that loss means you’re probably going to have to work harder than other people, maybe for good.4 Coming to grips with this is important, because then you can work with it.

6. Brain over brawn

When it comes down to it, it’s not the body or the metabolism that are actually creating overweight or obesity – it’s the brain. Over time, poor decisions lead to significant changes in how the brain governs – and responds to – the hunger and satiation processes8. The good news? By developing new habits, we can help correct the brain patterns that lead to weight gain, for example, by training ourselves to adopt healthy behaviours such as calorie restriction, healthy food choices and exercise. It just takes time.

 

References

  1. Foster-Schubert KE, Alfano CM, Duggan CR et al. (2011) Effect of diet and exercise, alone or combined, on weight and body composition in overweight-to-obese post-menopausal women. Obesity (Silver Spring). August; 20(8): 1628–1638.
  2. Jost PD. (2008). Simulating human space physiology with bed rest. Hippokratia, 12(Suppl 1), 37–40.
  3. MacLean PS, Higgins JA, Wyatt HR et al. (2009) Regular exercise attenuates the metabolic drive to regain weight after long-term weight loss. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 297(3):R793-802. doi: 10.1152/ajpregu.00192.2009.
  4. Catenacci VA, Grunwald GK, Ingebrigtsen JP et al. (2010) Physical activity patterns using accelerometry in the National Weight Control Registry. Obesity (Silver Spring). 19(6):1163-70. doi: 10.1038/oby.2010.264.
  5. Pagoto SL, Appelhans BM. (2013) A Call for an End to the Diet Debates. JAMA. 310(7):687-688. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.8601.
  6. Park M (2010) Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds. CNN News story. Accessed online June 2105 at http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html
  7. Chiuve SE, Sampson L, Willett WC. (2011) The association between a nutritional quality index and risk of chronic disease. Am J Prev Med. 40(5):505-13. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2010.11.022.
  8. Stanek KM, Grieve SM, Brickman AM et al. (2011) Obesity Is Associated With Reduced White Matter Integrity in Otherwise Healthy Adults. Obesity, 19:500–504. doi: 10.1038/oby.2010.312

 

Kat Boehringer 
Freelance journalist and editor 

Kat Boehringer specialises in health communications including health writing, health promotions, and social media management. In her spare time she works as a massage therapist and aspiring novelist. Connect with her at LinkedIn.

 

Receive Emma’s healthy recommendations straight to your inbox!