When you burn more calories than you consume, you lose weight. You can exercise to burn those calories or you can limit your caloric intake as part of your diet plan. Does it matter which you choose? The results of one study concluded that it doesn’t.
The study was conducted by doctors at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For six months, thirty-five overweight but healthy individuals were monitored. During the study, they were separated into three groups. Eleven people followed a weight maintenance diet where they didn’t have to make lifestyle or diet changes. Twelve people had to reduce their caloric intake by 25 percent. The remainder of the participants had to reduce their caloric intake by 12.5 percent and increase exercise by 12.5 percent.
At the end of the study, participants in the restricted caloric intake group and the participants who exercised while restricting caloric intake lost about 10 percent of their body weight, 24 percent of fat mass, and 27 percent of abdominal fat. The study also showed that a combination of diet and exercise doesn’t change body composition and distribution of abdominal fat. In other words, performing certain exercises to lose weight in specific areas of the body doesn’t work. (A physical trainer once told me this. Yet, women’s magazines are famous for target exercises.) Furthermore, the study showed that you can lose weight by limiting caloric intake or limiting calories and exercising. So, calories play an important role in weight loss.
In the study, the amount of calories consumed equaled the amount of the increase in exercise (or energy to burn calories). Under these conditions, fat will decrease throughout the body, not in a specific area. One doctor, Dr. Eric Vassun, suggested that genetics is the reason our bodies store fat a certain way making it difficult to change fat distribution. He said that combining diet and exercise is the best way to improve total health.