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Diet, exercise together best for losing weight

By Tom Valeo, Times Correspondent
In print: Tuesday, August 19, 2008

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If you want to lose weight, should you join Weight Watchers or a fitness club?

The answer, according to an exercise professor who tested these two alternatives on 43 overweight, sedentary women, is just what you would expect: You should join both.

Steven Ball, assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of Missouri, had half the women join Weight Watchers, and the other half join a fitness center, where they received several sessions with a personal trainer.

His study, titled "Comparison of a Commercial Weight Loss Program to a Fitness Center," was published in the Journal of Exercise Physiology.

The women who joined Weight Watchers lost about 5 percent of their body weight, or about 9 pounds on average, but about one-third of that weight consisted of muscle, which is something you want to hang on to as you age.

As a result, their percentage of body fat stayed about the same.

"Losing lean tissue often slows metabolism," Ball said in an interview. "That was a negative."

Ball had a CT scan done on the women before and after the 12-week test period, to see if they lost any of the visceral fat that accumulates around the organs and causes the abdomen to protrude.

Visceral fat seems to promote metabolic syndrome, the medical term for an unhealthy combination of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, insulin resistance and other troublesome indicators of poor health.

To Ball's surprise, the Weight Watchers group did lose some visceral fat. The surprise was resulted from the fact that other research has suggested that only vigorous exercise gets rid of this deep abdominal fat.

The women who joined a fitness center also lost some visceral fat — when they stuck with their exercise program. But the drop-out rate among the exercisers was twice as high as the rate among the test group who joined Weight Watchers.

"These were sedentary, overweight women," Ball emphasized. "A commercial fitness center is a very intimidating environment for them.

"Even though we gave them three sessions with a fitness trainer, they were mostly left on their own, and they probably didn't do the volume of exercise we recommended, or the intensity of exercise, so they didn't do too well."

Now, when people ask him whether they should join Weight Watchers or a gym, Ball advises them to do both:

"It's good to have a structured dietary plan, and Weight Watchers can offer you that," Ball says, "but you need to exercise when you restrict your calorie intake because you don't want to lose all that lean tissue.

"I think the outcome of this study speaks volumes about the necessity for a multipronged approach in order to lose weight and body fat and to gain health benefits."

Freelancer Tom Valeo writes about medical and health issues. Write to him in care of Pulse, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or e-mail features@sptimes.com.