Weight Loss, Diet and Slimming blog

Tuesday, September 11. 2007

Weight Loss Minus the Hunger

Weight loss minus the hunger

FOODS that fill you up without packing a ton of calories can help in the battle of the bulge, results of a new study suggest.

In the study, obese women who reduced the “energy density” of their diet by cutting their intake of fats and adding more fruits and vegetables lost more weight over a 12-month period, and felt less hungry, than did those who simply reduced their fat intake.

“Incorporating low caloriedense foods into the diet is an effective strategy for lowering calories and reducing hunger when you’re trying to lose weight,” study co-author Dr Julia A. Ello-Martin, of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania said.

“This is an approach that allows you to focus on the foods that you should be eating rather than focusing on restricting calories,” she added.

One of the reasons people don’t stick to a weight-loss diet is hunger. Ello-Martin and her colleagues speculated that a diet that controls hunger by encouraging dieters to fill up on low energy-density foods may improve adherence as well as increase weight loss.


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Why Exercise Promotes Weight Loss

Health24.com
Why exercise promotes weight loss

Exercise can make an important contribution to preventing or reversing obesity. Exercise is essential in controlling or reducing body weight. Here are the 10 major reasons why exercise helps you to lose weight.

Direct energy expenditure
Exercise helps with weight maintenance through direct energy expenditure (burning extra energy derived from body fat) and also improves aerobic fitness.

Mobilisation of body fat
Exercise mobilises body fat and increases fat oxidation - so when you exercise the sluggish energy stores in body fat get put into use and burnt to release energy, thus reducing the amount of fat stored in the body.

Greater benefit for overweight people
Studies have shown that overweight people lose more body fat when they exercise than lean individuals. Thus exercise, especially of the aerobic type like cycling, jogging and brisk walking, has a more pronounced effect on those people who are obese and want to lose weight, than on people who are already thin.

Increases lean muscle tissue
Resistance exercise like gym workouts using apparatus and weight-lifting increases lean body mass or muscle tissue which has a higher energy turnover than fat tissue. By increasing the amount of lean muscle tissue in the body, the amount of energy you require to keep you body ticking over is also increased - a condition that promotes weight-loss.

Counteracts energy conserving measures
Exercise counteracts some of the self-protecting physiological responses to weight-reduction diets. When the human body is exposed to a reduced food intake on a low-calorie/kilojoule diet, a number of protective functions get activated to preserve the energy supply, for example processes that use up energy are reduced or switched off to conserve energy. If a low-calorie/kilojoule diet is combined with exercise, the body cannot go into the "switch-off mode", thus leading to weight-loss.

Raises resting metabolic rate
Exercise stimulates the sympathetic part of the nervous system and raises the so-called resting metabolic rate (RMR). The RMR is the amount of energy your body needs to keep physiological progresses going (breathing, heart beat, digestion) when you are completely at rest. If the RMR is boosted then you use up more energy even when you are resting and start to lose weight.

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