Perhaps more importantly, most of the studies managed to get people to exercise only 30 minutes a day, at which point the average weight loss goes down to three pounds. One research study in The Netherlands also highlighted the problem that simply starting and sticking with a serious programme of exercise is easier after you’ve lost some weight.
Men and women ranging from thin to slightly overweight volunteered to train for a half-marathon in a study lasting 40 weeks.
The heavier subjects within this group were only slightly overweight, but even so, they were the ones who dropped out before the training was halfway through. It’s not that the overweight people were lazy, just that exercise is much harder if you are carrying around even 20 excess pounds – the equivalent of a large backpack full of textbooks – while you do it.
Which brings us back to dieting and how to make it really work and, in particular, how do you avoid common concerns like weight-loss plateau (when the body adapts to the lower calorie intake and slows down the metabolism accordingly)? The answer is simple: by cutting enough calories.
Many popular diets don’t cut as many calories as is needed, because they don’t deal with the hunger factor well enough to go further.
These diets do achieve short-term weight loss with a combination of small calorie cuts and low-sodium meals that cause water excretion, but once water balance stabilises, you begin to feel like your dieting is getting nowhere.
‘Eat the right food at the right time’
The first principle of successful dieting is to get calories low enough to cause ongoing, serious fat loss. In practice, this means getting daily calorie intake down to 1,200 calories a day if your starting weight is 8.5 to 11 stone, or to 1,800 a day for those weighing 14 to 17 stone.
Several studies have shown that at this level of intake, calorie requirements don’t decrease anywhere near enough to make your weight plateau, meaning fat continues to be pulled from fat cells and real weight continues to slide off.
The second principle involves eating the right foods at the right time; if you don’t, counting calories won’t cut it because you will be too hungry or unsatisfied to see it through.
Based on research studies, it’s clear that liquid calorie diets – from meal replacement drinks like Slim-Fast – do work, but they are so desperately boring that few people can stick to them.
To enjoy yourself more, go the real-food route and maximise benefits by ensuring every meal and snack you eat combines at least two of the properties that numerous research studies have shown cut hunger and increase the feeling of being full: high fibre, high protein, high volume and low glycaemic index carbs.
And keep those good foods coming. My experience of helping people lose weight showed that eating three meals and two to three snacks every day and spreading calories evenly from morning to night is about as important as choosing the right foods when it comes to suppressing hunger.
What about even faster weight loss? You know those diets: the ones that promise to dissolve 21/2 stone from your belly in one month, or a stone in four days. Unfortunately for anyone longing for results by next weekend, such diets are pure snake oil.
Crash dieting can work, but there is a threshold. It’s a physiological fact that the human body is capable of losing only a maximum of about three pounds of actual fat per week, even if you eat nothing at all.
Greater weight losses than this might occur for a week or two if you put yourself through the wringer of fruit juice fasts, purges, or harsh detox programmes, but you won’t lose any more fat – just water, intestinal contents and sometimes muscle. That’s the kind of weight that will bounce right back after a good party or two.
The bottom line is that regular workouts are great for health and strength, but if you want to lose weight, the really important thing is what you eat.
Stock up on the good foods that help with weight control, and then keep those calorie counts down to make weight loss a reality this time.
Start now, and there’s still time to put your new body on a collision course with summer.
Dr Susan Roberts is a British scientist currently working as a professor of nutrition at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and author of The Instinct Diet (www.instinctdiet.com).
This article is an adaptation of writings by Dr Roberts in The Daily Beast, www.thedailybeast.com.
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