Category: Weight Loss

Taking the two supplements lead to people in the study losing more belly fat and more fat overall.

Calcium supplementation combined with vitamin D can help weight loss, research finds.

Taking the two supplements led to people in the study losing more belly fat and more fat overall.

One study has even shown that people drinking more milk, which contains vitamin D and calcium, can double weight loss.

Up to half the world’s population may be deficient in vitamin D.

A deficiency in vitamin D could help to increase people’s appetite, research suggests.

Foods that are rich in vitamin D include oily fish and eggs, but most people get their vitamin D from the action of sunlight on the skin.

The body cannot produce calcium, so relies on it from food intake.

Foods high in calcium include dairy products, seeds, nuts and dark, leafy greens like spinach and kale.

Around half of people who are obese have a calcium deficiency.

For the study, 53 overweight or obese people were put on a calorie-restricted diet.

However, half were also given a 600 mg calcium supplement and a 125 IU vitamin D3 supplement.

The results showed that people taking calcium and vitamin D together lost 6 pounds of fat, while those in the comparison group only lost 4 pounds of fat.

The study’s authors write:

“Calcium plus vitamin D3 supplementation for 12 weeks augmented body fat and visceral fat loss in very-low calcium consumers during energy restriction.”

Although the exact mechanism for how calcium and vitamin D aid weight loss is not known, the authors speculate:

“The greater decrease in fat mass observed in the calcium+D group of the current study could result from several factors attributing to calcium metabolism.

First, a calcium-rich diet is shown to increase fat oxidation, promote fat cell apoptosis, and reduce lipid absorption due to the formation of insoluble calcium-fatty acid soaps in the intestine, which are eventually excreted in the feces.

Second, high dietary calcium intake is associated with suppression of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25-(OH)2D) levels which in turn act to decrease calcium influx into the cell.”

The study was published in the Nutrition Journal (Zhu et al., 2019).

A molecule found in this fruit prevents weight gain, reduces obesity and diabetes risk substantially.

Nobiletin — a citrus flavonoid found in tangerines and oranges — can increase weight loss, reduce obesity, and stop the development type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

A study examined the effect of the citrus flavonoid nobiletin in mice on a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet.

They found that administration of nobiletin made these mice lose weight.

They were leaner, responded better to insulin production, had lower blood sugar and blood fats than the others.

Past studies on mice have demonstrated that citrus flavonoids such as nobiletin and naringenin have the ability to decrease cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and type 2 diabetes.

Professor Murray Huff, study co-author, said:

“We went on to show that we can also intervene with nobiletin.

We’ve shown that in mice that already have all the negative symptoms of obesity, we can use nobelitin to reverse those symptoms, and even start to regress plaque build-up in the arteries, known as atherosclerosis.

The research team are still not sure how nobiletin can produce such positive health effects.

They thought it may be that the nobiletin molecule assists the AMP Kinase (AMPK) pathway in the body.

AMPK deals with fat in the body and decides whether to burn fat for energy or stop producing fats.

But nobiletin was still effective when the team injected nobiletin to genetically modified mice which had no AMPK in their body.

Professor Huff said:

“This result told us that nobiletin is not acting on AMP Kinase, and is bypassing this major regulator of how fat is used in the body.

What it still leaves us with is the question — how is nobiletin doing this?”

Despite this, clinically the results are still important because drugs for treating diabetes like metformin have to use the AMPK pathway and nobiletin doesn’t interfere with these medications.

Professor Huff concluded:

“Obesity and its resulting metabolic syndromes are a huge burden to our health care system, and we have very few interventions that have been shown to work effectively.

We need to continue this emphasis on the discovery of new therapeutics.”

The study was published in the Journal of Lipid Research (Morrow et al., 2020).

Exercising at this time can double the amount of fat burned.

Exercising before breakfast can double the amount of fat burned, research finds.

Levels of insulin in the body are much lower before breakfast, so the body uses more fat from the body to help generate fuel for exercise.

Doubling fat burning can also dramatically improve overall health.

The muscles of people exercising before breakfast had higher levels of key proteins that transport glucose.

Dr Javier Gonzalez, study co-author, said:

“Our results suggest that changing the timing of when you eat in relation to when you exercise can bring about profound and positive changes to your overall health.

We found that the men in the study who exercised before breakfast burned double the amount of fat than the group who exercised after.

Importantly, whilst this didn’t have any effect on weight loss, it did dramatically improve their overall health.

The group who exercised before breakfast increased their ability to respond to insulin, which is all the more remarkable given that both exercise groups lost a similar amount of weight and both gained a similar amount of fitness.

The only difference was the timing of the food intake.”

The study included 30 overweight and obese men who were put into two groups.

One group exercised before breakfast and the other one afterwards.

The increased fat burning is down to the lower insulin levels before breakfast.

Although exercising before breakfast did not lead to more weight loss, the study was only six weeks long.

However, exercising before breakfast was linked to other health benefits, including a stronger ability to respond to insulin.

This is linked to lower risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Dr Gareth Wallis, study co-author, said:

“This work suggests that performing exercise in the overnight-fasted state can increase the health benefits of exercise for individuals, without changing the intensity, duration or perception of their effort.

We now need to explore the longer-term effects of this type of exercise and whether women benefit in the same way as men.”

The study was published in the journal The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (Edinburgh et al., 2019).

Belly fat is linked to developing heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Exercise is the best way to reduce belly fat, research concludes.

Scientists compared the effects of exercise against medicines for reducing visceral (belly) fat.

The results showed that people lost more visceral fat per pound of total body weight lost.

Visceral fat is the fat that lies deep in the body and is linked to developing heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Dr Ian J. Neeland, the study’s first author, said:

“Visceral fat can affect local organs or the entire body system.

Systemically it can affect your heart and liver, as well as abdominal organs.

When studies use weight or body mass index as a metric, we don’t know if the interventions are reducing fat everywhere in the body, or just near the surface.”

The study was a review of 17 separate randomised controlled trials.

Together they followed 3,602 people for up to a six-month period.

The results showed that both exercise and medicines reduced visceral fat, but exercise worked better.

Dr Neeland said:

“The location and type of fat is important.

If you just measure weight or BMI, you can underestimate the benefit to your health of losing weight.

Exercise can actually melt visceral fat.”

Fat used to be seen as inactive by doctors, but now it is thought of as active in disease processes.

Around 40 percent of Americans are obese.

Dr Neeland said:

“Some people who are obese get heart disease, diabetes, or metabolic syndrome—and others don’t.

Our study suggests that a combination of approaches can help lower visceral fat and potentially prevent these diseases.”

The study was published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Rao et al., 2019).

Scientists compared many different types of diets to see which was most effective.

Many of the most popular diets are just as effective as each other, a large review of research concludes.

Whether it is low-carb, low-fat, Mediterranean or intermittent fasting, dieters lose about the same amount of weight, on average.

However, the Mediterranean and DASH diets also provide the highest protection against heart disease, the scientists found.

Some diets work much better for particular people.

It is partly down to which diet you can stick to, along with genetics and health status.

So, the key is to try different diets until hitting on one that suits.

Dr George A. Bray, the study’s first author, said:

“Individual weight loss approaches worked well for some people and not for others.

Currently, we have limited genetic and other information to predict which intervention will work for a given individual.

This demonstrates just how complex the problem of severe obesity is.”

The conclusions come from a massive, comprehensive review of the research on many different ways of losing weight.

Including over 400 studies on all types of weight loss interventions, only surgery proved a markedly more effective option than the rest.

Different diets and behavioural interventions were modestly successful, on average.

Modest success, however, is not what people want, said Dr Bray:

“There often is a mismatch between the patient’s cosmetic goals and what can realistically be achieved with diet and exercise.

While a modest 5 percent to 10 percent weight loss can yield significant health benefits, that may not provide the cosmetic changes patients seek.”

There was little evidence that dietary supplements — which are not evaluated by the FDA — can aid weight loss.

Dr Bray said:

“Effectively treating obesity is crucial if we are going to be able to address the devastating impact diabetes and cardiovascular disease have on public health.

We are seeing promising research into diabetes medications linked to weight loss, the use of peptides to enhance weight loss, and improved techniques for modulating the way food moves through the digestive system and is absorbed into the body.

As our scientific understanding of obesity continues to improve, we hope this will lead to the discovery of new treatment approaches.”

The study was published in the journal Endocrine Reviews (Bray et al., 2018).

Both techniques lead to people losing 5 percent of their body weight.

Two of the most popular ways of losing weight are similarly effective, research shows.

Both intermittent fasting and a standard calorie-restricted diet work equally well.

The diets led to reductions of 5 percent of body weight in the current study, as well as improvements to general health.

The researchers say that choosing between them is a matter of personal taste.

Intermittent fasting involves using regular breaks in dieting, sometimes for a couple of days, in other diets for as much as a week.

A normal diet, in contrast, simply involves dieting continuously.

For the study, 150 overweight and obese people were split into two groups and put on either the intermittent fasting diet or a continuous calorie-restricted diet.

For the intermittent diet, people restricted their calories on just two days of the week to only 25 percent of what they would normally eat.

The other group restricted their calories to 80 percent of what they would normally eat every day.

So, both groups were eating roughly the same amount of calories in total.

Dr Ruth Schübel, the study’s first author, said:

“There are in fact only a few smaller studies on intermittent fasting so far, but they have come up with strikingly positive effects for metabolic health.

This made us curious and we intended to find out whether these effects can also be proven in a larger patient group and over a prolonged period.”

The results showed that both groups lost 5 percent of their body weight across almost a year.

Dr Schübel explained:

“In participants of both group, body weight and, along with it, visceral fat, or unhealthy belly fat, were lost and extra fat in the liver reduced.”

Intermittent fasting may suit some people better, said Dr Tilman Kühn, study co-author:

“In addition, for some people it seems to be easier to be very disciplined on two days instead of counting calories and limiting food every day.

But in order to keep the new body weight, people must also permanently switch to a balanced diet following DGE [The German Nutrition Society] recommendations.”

The study was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Schübel et al., 2018).

What form of intermittent fasting is the best: alternate day fasting, the 5:2 diet, or time-restricted eating?

Intermittent fasting, which comes in several types, causes mild to moderate weight loss, reduces blood pressure, blood sugar levels, triglyceride and cholesterol levels.

This pattern of eating can improve microbial gut diversity and help people eat less throughout the day.

But which is the best type of intermittent fasting?

A group of researchers reviewed 25 studies on three forms of intermittent fasting:

• Time-restricted eating: an eating window of 8 to 12 hours and fasting during the remaining hours each day.
• 5:2 diet: five days eating normally and two days fasting with restricting the food intake to 500 calories.
• Alternate day fasting: fasting on every other day with restricting the food intake to 500 calories.

The studies reported that those who follow a time-restricted eating regime noticed 3 percent weight loss.

While alternate day fasting produced 3 to 8 percent weight loss within three to eight weeks.

The weight loss results for the 5:2 diet group are similar to alternate day fasting, the finding is surprising as people on the 5:2 diet fasted much less than those who did alternate-day fasting.

The 5:2 diet and alternate day fasting produces similar weight loss results to regular dieting such as low-calorie diets.

Professor Krista Varady, the study’s first author, said:

“We noted that intermittent fasting is not better than regular dieting; both produce the same amount of weight loss and similar changes in blood pressure, cholesterol and inflammation.”

Moreover, people on any of these two intermittent fasting regimens have been found to maintain 7 percent weight loss over a year.

Professor Varady said:

“You’re fooling your body into eating a little bit less and that’s why people are losing weight.”

The review includes some practical advice for individuals who may consider an intermittent fasting regimen.

Side-effects, such as dizziness, constipation, and headaches will drop within one or two weeks of fasting.

Drinking more water can reduce headaches due to dehydration.

• Exercise: Moderate to high-intensity activity is possible as some participants reported that exercise gives them more energy during the fasting hours. Though, it is recommended to have the fasting meal after exercise.
• What to eat: Make sure you eat fruits, vegetables and whole grains as they are high in fibre, which eases constipation.
• Avoid alcohol and caffeine: Alcohol and caffeinated energy drinks are high in calories and can cause headaches due to dehydration.
• Who should avoid fasting: Those with a BMI less than 18.5, those with eating disorders, those who need to take their medicine with a meal at regular times, children under 12, pregnant or lactating women, and shift workers.

Professor Varady said:

“People love intermittent fasting because it’s easy.

People need to find diets that they can stick to long term.

It’s definitely effective for weight loss and it’s gained popularity because there are no special foods or apps necessary.

You can also combine it with other diets, like Keto.”

The study was published in the Annual Review of Nutrition (Varady et al., 2021).

An effective therapy that changes your eating habits and helps you lose weight.

Intensive behavioural therapy is a treatment for obesity in which dietitians and nutritionists help patients to change their poor eating habits.

This treatment works very well as adults lose weight after each session they attend, a new study shows.

Around 40 percent of American adults are obese and at high risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and certain cancers associated with obesity.

The research reviewed the outcome of intensive behavioural therapy sessions conducted by registered dietitians and nutritionists on 2,097 obese females.

Intensive behavioural therapy for obesity (IBTO) caused considerable improvements as patients in the treatment group lost 1.22 lbs (0.5 kg) per visit.

Whereas patients in the control group who didn’t undergo the therapy sessions gained more weight.

Patients in the treatment group also took prescription drugs for a shorter time and on average 6 days less compared to the control group.

In addition to the weight loss, patients who did IBTO saw a decline in their body mass index (BMI) and blood sugar.

The first month of the IBTO treatment consisted of a once a week session with a registered dietitian.

For the next six months, the therapy sessions were every two weeks and thereafter once a month for the rest of year if the patient lost 3 kg weight within the first 6 months of therapy.

During the therapy they talked about diet, behavioural and lifestyle changes including increases in physical activity.

The dietitians and patients discussed health risks and factors influencing their decision making.

At each session the dietitians provided clear and certain recommendations tailored for their patients.

Both patients and dietitians went through the options to see which method and goal was achievable.

They also discussed any progress and challenges throughout the follow-up meetings.

Dr Lauren Sastre, study co-author, said:

“We are excited about our findings, which demonstrated registered dietitian nutritionist delivered intensive behavioral therapy for obesity to Medicare beneficiaries is effective and beneficial for patients.

This particularly important in light of the growing pressure on providers to track and demonstrate improved Medicare patient outcomes, which include weight status.”

The study was published in the journal of Family Practice (Jacobs et al., 2020).

These popular diets can promote weight loss and boost heart health for a period of time.

Most popular weight loss diets can lead to modest reductions in both weight and cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, a study has found.

Low carbohydrate diets like Atkins and Zone, macro diets like Mediterranean and DASH, and low fat diets such as the Ornish diet, all support weight reduction to some extent.

Researchers suggest that most weight loss diets will have some short-term weight loss effects up to six months so people should choose what diet suits them most and not to worry that other diets might be better.

The weight loss effect of popular named diets appears to diminish at the 12-month point.

Except for the Mediterranean diet in lowering ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol, the cardiovascular health effects will lessen at 12 months for all popular named diets.

Since 1975, obesity has tripled globally, consequently pushing society to promote any dietary program that can improve heart health or grab any weight loss plan.

Hence the study compares different diets to see their impact on weight loss and cardiovascular risk factors including cholesterol levels and high blood pressure.

The team analysed data from 121 trials with nearly 22,000 overweight or obese adult participants who either followed a usual diet or one of 14 popular diets including Atkins, Portfolio, DASH, Mediterranean, Ornish, Biggest Loser, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Zone, Paleolithic, Slimming World, Rosemary Conley, South Beach, and Volumetrics.

In comparison to a usual diet, low fat and low carbohydrate diets showed a reduction of 4 to 5 kg in weight and a modest drop in blood pressure over six months.

The weight loss and blood pressure lowering effect was slightly less for the macro diets group.

People in the Zone, Atkins and DASH group lost between 3.5 and 5.5 kg, suggesting these diets had the largest weight loss effect and greatest impact on lowering blood pressure.

The LDL cholesterol reduction was at the highest for the Mediterranean diet, while dietary advice, Ornish, Biggest Loser, DASH, and a low fat diet were no better than a usual diet in lowering ‘bad’ cholesterol.

The authors wrote:

“The extensive range of popular diets analysed, provides a plethora of choice but no clear winner.”

They advise that we need to focus on how to maintain weight loss instead of discussing what dietary pattern is best.

Unfortunately, most people take no notice of national dietary guidelines that encourage the public to drink less alcohol and soft drinks, reduce salt and sugar intakes, and eat more whole grains, vegetables, and legumes.

The authors concluded:

“If we are to change the weight trajectory of whole populations, we may learn more from understanding how commercial diet companies engage and retain their customers, and translate that knowledge into more effective health promotion campaigns.”

The study was published in the BMJ (Ge et al., 2020).