THE BEST WAY FOR WOMEN TO LOSE FAT

THE BEST WAY FOR WOMEN TO LOSE FAT
It’s nuts. Whether it’s because of a New Year’s resolution, the approach of flesh-baring summer, or even some upcoming milestone event they want to “look good for,” women everywhere are drawn to the folly of aerobic activity.

If only that were the worst of it. They usually combine it with some sort of severe calorie restriction that would, in comparison, make the participants of the Bataan Death March seem like a bunch of gourmands participating in a progressive dinner.

They get smaller, all right, the same way a fresh corpse gets smaller if you leave it next to the radiator for a few weeks. That’s a colorful and, yeah, harsh way of saying that they lose as much/more muscle as fat, and they kind of, well, shrivel. They may fit into a size two dress, but they look like the Corpse Bride – great cheekbones, but that’s about it.

Those of us who study exercise and diet for a living know better, but our advice usually falls on stubborn ears. So in the hopes of converting at least a few of these intransigent souls, I went looking for the best-designed study I could find on the topic of women, weight training, and weight loss.

I tracked down what I was looking for in a 2017 study published in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition, Exercise, and Metabolism. It found that women in their 30’s who combined weightlifting with mild calorie restriction lost 2 pounds of fat for every pound of muscle they gained and fared much better, body composition-wise, than those who just dieted.

Additionally, they confirmed what many of us already know: that calorie restriction, at least mild calorie restriction, doesn’t appear to affect metabolism.

How’d They Figure This Out?
The scientists recruited 40 healthy but overweight females (over 30% body fat), average age 32, and separated them into four groups for a four-month study:

Resistance Training Only (RT)
Diet Only (DT)
Resistance Training plus Diet (RT+Diet)
Control (CON)
A registered dietitian calculated each woman’s resting metabolic rate (RMR). All participants also had their body fat measured. That info was used to calculate their daily macronutrient and calorie goals. The women in the diet groups received 500 fewer calories per day than their bodies needed to maintain body weight.

All diet plans, regardless of whether they were calorie restriction diets or calorie maintenance diets, consisted of 3.1 grams of protein per kilogram of fat-free mass, 20% of calories from fat, and the remainder from carbohydrate.

Those in the resistance training groups were required to work out 2 to 3 times a week under the supervision of a personal trainer. The program was designed to work virtually every major muscle group in the body and contained such mainstays as squats, deadlifts, and bench press.

As I said, this was a well-designed study.