Weight-loss programs can help people shed the pounds, but many people have trouble keeping it off. The new results could help women figure out how much exercise is sufficient to keep from tipping the scales again.

“The weight creeps back on again, and people put on all the weight they’ve lost, and sometimes more,” study author I-Min Lee of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass.

In addition, the study lends insight to national recommendations on exercise. For instance, the current U.S. federal guidelines say people should get 150 minutes of moderate-level activity per week to obtain health benefits and reduce the risk of chronic diseases. But the guidelines say nothing about weight-gain prevention. The Institute of Medicine, a non-governmental U.S. organization, recommends that people get an hour of moderate exercise a day, or 420 minutes per week to prevent obesity.

Such drastically different recommendations deserve clarification, Lee said.

Counting pounds

The study involved more than 34,000 women in the United States, and looked at how much weight they gained over a 13-year period, from 1992 to 2007.

The women were divided into three groups: those who engaged in less than 150 minutes of moderate-level physical activity per week; those who performed 150 to 420 minutes of this type of activity per week; and those who did more than 420 minutes per week, which comes out to one hour a day. Moderate-level activities included things like brisk walking, gardening and leisurely bicycling.

On average, the women gained about 6 pounds (2.6 kilograms) during the study period. Those in the two lesser activity groups (less than 150 minutes or between 150 and 420 minutes) gained significantly more weight than those who exercised more than 420 minutes a week.

While more physical activity was associated with less weight gain, this finding only held true for “normal” weight women, those with body mass index (BMI) of 25 or less. (BMI is calculated with a person’s height and weight and is considered an indicator of body fatness. An adult with a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight.)

“Among heavier women, there was no relationship between how much activity a women did and what weight she gained,” Lee said.

However, Lee notes that the physical activity levels included in the study were not very high, and higher levels might be more sufficient at preventing weight gain.

The results are published in the March 24 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

How much should I exercise?

Here’s what recommendations from the new study might look like: The results speak to middle aged-women (average age 54) with a normal diet, since that’s who participated in the study.

Only about 13 percent of the women gained less than 5 pounds during the study and did not become overweight or obese. On average, these women got about 420 minutes of exercise per week. So if you’re normal weight and want to avoid weight gain as you age, you should get about an hour of moderate exercise per day, the researcher say.

The same recommendations might not apply to overweight and obese individuals, who in the study did not have the same benefits from physical activity as normal-weight individuals. But that’s not to say heavier individuals should give up exercise, Lee said.

The group differences might come down to how much the individuals move around when they aren’t exercising, Lee said.

“In addition to physical activity, it’s also the things that you do in your regular life that contribute to caloric expenditure,” Lee said. “So it could be that the heavier people are also spontaneously moving less.”

Lee recommends that these individuals still get try to get 150 minutes of exercise per week, since this does have proven health benefits in terms of warding off chronic disease.

“Then if you’re willing to do more, either do more exercise or cut your calories, or a combination of both,” she said.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Technorati Tags: medicine, Overweight Women, preventing weight gain, weight loss programs, weight-gain prevention

The study, published Jan. 28 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, conflicts with research that suggests that being overweight contributes to a long list of health problems, including heart disease.

“Our study suggests that those people who survive to age 70 in reasonable health have a different set of risks and benefits associated with the amount of body fat to younger people,” lead researcher Leon Flicker, of the University of Western Australia, said in a news release from the journal’s publisher.

Flicker and colleagues looked at a decade’s worth of data regarding the health of more than 9,200 Australians aged 70 to 75 in 1996 when the study began. Australia is ranked as the third most obese country in the world after the United States and the United Kingdom, the study authors noted.

The study defined overweight and obesity levels based on body mass index, a measurement that takes weight and height into account. The four weight categories used in the study included underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese.

Those who were overweight — a step below obese — faced a 13 percent lower risk of death compared with those who were normal weight. But there was no benefit found for those who were obese, the study authors noted.

The researchers also found that being sedentary doubled the risk of death for women and raised it by one-quarter for men.

According to the study authors, it may be time to reevaluate the system that determines who is overweight and obese.

Technorati Tags: obesity, Overweight

Liraglutide, marketed as Victoza, outperformed the established anti-obesity drug orlistat, commercialised as Alli or Xenical, among 564 European volunteers, it suggests.

The 135 men and 429 women volunteers were divided into three groups.

One received daily liraglutide at four different dosages; the second received orlistat; and the third were given a harmless lookalike called a placebo.

In the fortnight before the trial, all the volunteers began a regime that combined daily exercise with a cut in calorie intake by 500 calories.

By comparison, 500 calories is roughly a quarter of the recommended daily energy intake for women, and about a fifth of the recommended intake for men.

Five months later, the liraglutide patients had each lost between 4.8 and 7.2 kilos (10.5 and 15.8 pounds) on average depending on the dosage; the orlistat volunteers had lost 4.1 kilos (9.0 pounds); and the placebo group 2.8 kilos (6.1 pounds).

Seventy-six percent of the high-dosage liraglutide takers lost more than five percent of their weight, compared with 44 percent in the orlistat group and 30 percent in the placebo group.

There was also a big reduction in “prediabetes” conditions among the liraglutide group.

Liraglutide was “well-tolerated,” according to the study.

“Nausea and vomiting occurred more often in individuals on liraglutide than in those on placebo, but adverse events were mainly transient and rarely led to discontinuation of treatment.”

Liraglutide, which is administered into the skin through an injector, was initially developed as a treatment to control blood glucose levels for patients with Type 2 diabetes.

But one of its impacts is to brake the emptying of the contents of the stomach into the intestine, thus prolonging a feeling of satiety.

The study was led by Arne Astrup, a professor of nutrition at the University of Copenhagen. He is also an advisor to liraglutide’s manufacturers, the Danish company Novo Nordisk A/S. The study data was vetted by The Lancet, a peer-reviewed journal.

The authors say the results offer “a new mode of action” for treating obesity, for which only a few effective and safe drugs are available.

Obesity has reached epidemic-level proportions in many rich economies as well as in fast-growing emerging countries.

Over the past 20 years, the rate of obesity has tripled and is more than 30 percent in some European countries, according to an estimate published last year.

Volunteers in the study had a body mass index (BMI) of between 30 and 40. A BMI — one’s weight in kilos divided by one’s height in metres squared — that is above 30 is generally categorised as obese.

Technorati Tags: alli, diabetes drug, Liraglutide, low-fat diet, orlistat, Victoza, xenical

Oregon researchers collected data on almost 1,700 obese women (their body mass index was 30 or higher) who gave birth between 2000 and 2005.

“We found that 70 percent of the women were exceeding the recommended weight gain for women in their weight category,” said researcher Victor J. Stevens, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. What’s more, “these women had a lot of difficulty losing that weight, and on average retained 40 percent of it [a year later],” he said.

“That’s a concern as they are already heavy enough to have health problems related to their weight, and retaining significant weight gain after pregnancy just makes it worse,” Stevens said.

For an obese woman, gaining too much weight during pregnancy also increases the risk of complications, such as diabetes, hypertension, preeclampsia, bigger babies, C-sections and birthing injuries.

The research was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and appears in the November issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

In the study, Stevens’ team noted the women’s starting weight (between six months before conception and 12 weeks after conception), delivery weight and their later weight at eight and 18 months after giving birth.

The researchers defined excess weight gain as more than 15 pounds.

Women who gained 15 to 25 pounds were twice as likely to retain 10 pounds of that weight over the next year and a half, compared to women who had less weight gain. Those who packed on more than 35 pounds were almost eight-times more likely to retain 10 pounds of that extra bulk, the team found.

Younger women and first-time mothers were most likely to put on too much weight, the researchers note.

“We would like to see better services for women to help them manage their weight gain during pregnancy,” Stevens said.

Other experts agreed.

Samantha Heller, a registered dietitian, clinical nutritionist and exercise physiologist in Fairfield, Conn., said for anyone who is already overweight or obese when she gets pregnant, “it is going to be even more difficult to lose the post-pregnancy weight.”

But moms-to-be should not diet during pregnancy, she said. “We don’t want a study like this to scare people into doing that. What we want people to do is eat carefully and healthfully when they are pregnant, but not overeat.”

Nor should new mothers try to lose the extra weight during the first few months after delivery, Heller said.

“The women are exhausted, their body is still going through huge changes,” she said. “If they are breast-feeding, we don’t want them restricting calories at a high level, because they need those extra calories to produce breast milk.”

Because it is so difficult for many women to control weight gain during and after pregnancy, Heller believes they need more support and education.

To control weight gain during pregnancy, Kaiser Permanente offers these tips:

• Watch your diet. Each day have 8 to 12 servings of fruits and vegetables, 3 servings of low-fat dairy, 5 to 9 ounces of protein-rich foods, 6 to 10 servings of whole grains and 3 to 7 teaspoons of fats, such as olive oil and nuts.
• Eat regular meals and small healthy snacks between meals.
• Cut fat to less than 30 percent of your calories.
• Cut back on sweets and sugary drinks.
• Keep a food diary to check for nutritional adequacy and portion management.
• Have only 100 to 300 calories a day more than you had before you became pregnant.
• Exercise at least 30 minutes a day. If you don’t exercise, ask your doctor how to start an exercise program.

Technorati Tags: Kaiser Permanente Center, lose the post-pregnancy weight, obesity during pregnancy

The study is the first to quantify the relative contributions of food and exercise habits to the growing number of Americans with bulging waistlines.

“In the U.S., over the last 30 years, it seems that the food side of the equation has changed much more than the physical activity side,” Professor Boyd A. Swinburn, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, noted in a telephone interview with Reuters Health.

Weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all due to the consumption of more calories, with declines in physical activity playing only a minor role, Swinburn explained.

“We absolutely need to continue to promote increased physical activity and a healthy diet because they are both obviously beneficial factors in terms of obesity,” he emphasized. “But when it comes to placing priorities, I think it needs to be on reducing energy intake. It’s particularly important for policymakers to focus on the energy intake side of the equation.”

In the study, Swinburn and his colleagues calculated how much adults need to eat in order to maintain a stable weight and how much children need to eat in order to maintain a normal growth curve.

They then figured out how much Americans were actually eating, using national food supply data from the 1970s and the early 2000s. This information allowed them to predict how much weight Americans would be expected to gain over the 30-year study period if food intake were the only influence.

Next, the investigators determined the actual weight gained over the study period using data from a nationally representative survey that recorded the weight of Americans in the 1970s and early 2000s.

In children, according to Swinburn and colleagues, the predicted and actual weight increase matched exactly, which indicates that the increases in energy intake alone over the 30 years studied could explain the added pounds, they say.

In adults, the data predicted that they would be 10.8 kg (23.8 pounds) heavier, but in fact they were only 8.6 kg (18.9 pounds) heavier. This finding, Swinburn noted, “suggests that excess food intake still explains the weight gain, but that there may have been increases in physical activity over the 30 years that have blunted what would otherwise have been a higher weight gain.”

“To return to the average weights of the 1970s, we would need to reverse the increased food intake of about 350 calories a day for children (about one can of fizzy drink and a small portion of French fries) and 500 calories a day for adults (about one large hamburger),” Swinburn noted in a statement from the meeting.

“Alternatively, we could achieve similar results by increasing physical activity by about 150 minutes a day of extra walking for children and 110 minutes for adults, but realistically, although a combination of both is needed, the focus would have to be on reducing calorie intake,” he added.

Acomplia is a CB1 cannabinoid receptor antagonist, and it’s main avenue of effect is reduction in appetite. Acomplia acts by obstructing the receptors, which control the food intake and energy expenditure – Thus resulting in reduced appetite. You can find more information about original Acomplia medication online.

Technorati Tags: acomplia, obesity, obesity epidemic, obesity in the usa, obesity reason, overeating, reduce appetite

As reported in The Cochrane Library, Dr. Jill L. Colquitt and colleagues, from the University of Southampton, UK, searched various electronic databases and identified 26 studies that compared weight loss surgical procedures (also called bariatric surgery) with each other or with non-surgical treatments for obesity such as drugs, diets and exercise.

The studies included three randomized trials and three prospective studies that compared surgical with non-surgical treatments. The remaining 20 studies were trials that compared various types of bariatric operations.

Overall, the authors found that surgery provided greater weight loss for any degree of obesity compared with non-surgical treatments. Surgery was also associated with reductions in diabetes, hypertension, and other co-existing conditions. Improvements in health-related quality of life were noted after 2 years, but their long-term persistence was unclear.

The bariatric operations were not free from complications, including serious ones such as pulmonary embolism and even postoperative death, the report indicates.

In the studies that compared different bariatric procedures, there was some evidence that gastric bypass provided greater weight loss than did vertical banded gastroplasty or adjustable gastric banding.

Isolated sleeve gastrectomy and banded gastric bypass both produced weight losses comparable to that seen with gastric bypass.

No statistically significant differences in weight loss or quality of life were seen between procedures performed using conventional open surgery and those using laparoscopic bariatric procedures.

Due to limited data, the authors were unable to reach firm conclusions regarding the relative safety of each bariatric operation.

While surgery produces greater weight loss than conventional obesity treatments, and exactly which procedure provides the best mix of effectiveness and safety is unclear, they note.

SOURCE: Cochrane Database System Review 2009.

Technorati Tags: obese, obese patients, obesity, obesity surgery, obesity treatments, severe obesity, weight loss, weight losses

The process of fasting is simply going without food and/or water for a specified amount of time Hippocrates often referred to as the Father of Western Medicine recommended fasting for people who were sick. Even today most doctors will tell you to fast before or after a visit depending on the procedure you are at the doctor’s office for. Appetite suppressants like Reductil can be used to begin the fasting process by taking away your desire to eat. However, you will need the will power to continue and you need to drink plenty of water during this time. The best advice I could give to anyone is to start off slow by going with out a meal a day. Over a period of time you will develop a tolerance and you can start going hours a time without food.

There are many benefits to fasting that go beyond weight loss. Fasting helps to cleanse the body out of toxins that are built up and store in your system. These toxins are stored inside of the human body by the pounds in various forms primarily in the intestinal regions. Releasing them will not only cause weight loss but will restore your body to its natural state. Over time these toxins cause internal poisoning to your blood stream so it is important to get rid of them. Drinking vegetable juice or fruit drinks during the fasting process will aid in pushing these po
isons out of the body.

People with oversized stomachs usually have undigested food stored inside that rots away in the body causing all kinds of sickness and disease. Fasting will help to ease the stomach contents out rapidly while reducing pounds off of your body. During this time many people may have a sick or fatigued feeling because they are exposing these inner poisons and chemicals to be released from the body. Since they would normally sit there undisturbed and continue to drain the body it is usually unnoticeable that they are present. This is a necessary step to go through though because the only other alternative would be to leave them in the body.

Many people are completely unaware that they may have intestinal parasites. These parasites feed off of these many toxins in the body and continue to grow causing an ongoing weak and tired feeling to a person. Once you begin to fast these parasites will come out of your system along with many of the toxins. Since the toxins go first the parasites no longer have anything to feed off of and die out.

I can’t stress how important it is to drink lots of liquids while fasting to flush the system out. Reductil, Xenical and Acomplia can help stop toxins from being reabsorbed back into the body. Toxins can be released through the skin which is normal as they are on a regular basis. The amount may increase during fasting so regular bathes are recommended to cleanse the flesh.

The main benefit fasting seems to play on the body is letting go build up toxins that build up over time. It is estimated that the every person has at least ten pounds of unwanted materials in their body or more that fasting will release. It is worth trying a fast just to let go of these unwanted pounds of waste stored. You may want to consult a family doctor before you begin your fast to find out more information.