Effective Weight Loss Strategy For Men and Women: Diet and Exercise

With the rising problems in obesity, changing the eating habits and exercise are vital factors that would help you counter this dilemma. Most experts advise that dietary change, specifically eating less fat, would help you in your pursuit in losing weight. There are also those that recommend exercise to ensure weight loss. However, a study confirms that proper diet is more effective than exercise since the former produces more weight loss results.

The study also shows that changes in lifestyle can help promote changes especially to women. Many studies have compared weight loss resulting from changing diet and increasing activity. And most results would disclose that weight loss during programs focused on dietary change produced two to three times greater weight loss than programs focused on exercise.

Those who want to lose weight however must put primary consideration on the overall health and not just about getting rid of the excess fats. This was revealed in one study that one year after the end of the eating and exercise programs; there was no significant difference in the weight status of participants.

Obesity problems arise when we consume more calories in food and drink than we burn up. To solve this, we need to balance what we eat and burn up more than what we consume. Cutting calories does not necessarily mean that we are on a diet. It is just a method of avoiding or limiting one or more foods in high calories from fat, lots of sugar, or alcohol. Watching what we eat can also be achieved by reducing portion sizes or by eating smaller portions of high-calorie foods and eating larger portions of low-calorie vegetables and fruits. Cutting the calorie consumption add up faster in the weight loss than an increase in exercise.

According to experts, a combination of smaller portions and changes in the eating habits can easily add up to reduce calorie consumption by 500 in a day as compared to burning an extra 500 calories daily.

The University of Minnesota found that moderate or substantial drops in dietary fat were linked to weight loss among men and women, regardless of how much they changed physical activity. On average, participants of the study decreased the number of high-fat foods they ate by five to ten servings a week. In women, the study also revealed that even substantial increases in exercise were not enough to result to weight loss if they did not decrease fat consumption. But to men, weight loss was achieved through increased exercise alone. This is because men were able to burn more calories in exercise than women, or because of the differences in the metabolic aspect between the two genders.

For men, the effects of exercise and dietary fat have independent effects on the amount of weight lost. For women, on the other hand, although exercise alone was not a successful strategy for losing weight, at each level of dietary fat reduction and those who increased activity—moderately or substantially—lost more weight than those who changed activity less.