Dieting makes you fat. You’ve probably heard the old adage before, but what is the evidence to support it? A new study has provided us with some valuable insight into this commonly held belief.
As the prevailing theory goes, when we diet ” and by that, I mean cut our calorie intake significantly ” we do lose weight, at least for a while. Part of that weight loss will be body fat, but we also lose some muscle along with it. While losing fat is what most of us are after, losing muscle is a problem. Put simply, muscle requires an input of energy (read: calories), even at rest, and as a result helps to speed our metabolism; fat, on the other hand, does not. By extension, the person with the higher body fat percentage will have a slower metabolism, meaning they burn fewer calories at rest, and therefore can afford to eat fewer calories, versus their more muscular counterparts. Because most people inevitably tire of the restriction and discipline required to stay the dieting course, going back to old habits mean that we regain the weight, but if we fail to regain the lost muscle, then we are actually left with a slower metabolism than we started with.
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That’s where the new study, published in the September issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , comes in. In this study, a team of U.S. researchers placed a group of 78 post-menopausal women on a weight loss diet, then followed up six and 12 months later. After a year, the researchers found that for every pound the women lost, about 25 per cent of the loss was muscle mass, but once they regained the weight, only 12 per cent of every pound they regained was muscle. In other words, the women regained only about half of the lean muscle tissue that they lost during the diet, while the remainder of the regain was body fat. This not only poses a problem for our metabolism, but muscle loss in older adults is particularly concerning as it plays a crucial role in bone health, agility and our ability to remain independent as we age.
So if you know you need to lose a few pounds, is there anything you can do to help preserve that crucial lean muscle? Here are a few things you can do to minimize muscle loss, regardless of your age:
Be realistic about weight loss
I cannot tell you how often I hear people tell me that they want to lose 30, 40 or 50 pounds, to which I often counter with a recommendation to aim to lose
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