Effect of high protein diet and exercise in weight loss

"A Calorie is a Calorie is a Calorie..." Or IS IT ?

Though there are tons of fitness articles written every month about why dieting for weight loss is bad and how doing resistance training helps weight loss by increasing muscle loss, I had not seen or read any study about the different approaches like, losing weight by cutting say, 800 calories from your daily calorie intake OR losing weight by just burning 800 calories by exercising everyday ? And does the carb-protein-fat ratio of the food intake have any effect on whether you are losing muscle or fat when you are cutting calories ?

Finally i found this paper that seems to answer all these questions by means of a study... This interesting paper titled, "Dietary Protein and Exercise have Additive Effects on Body Composition during Weight Loss in Adult Women", was published in the Journal of Nutrition.

and here's the Bottomline: High Protein diet (30% of total calories supplied by protein) along with exercise and resistance training seems to preserve muscle mass and produce greater fat loss. But the Carb heavy diet (15% protein) produced significantly greater decrease in Total cholesterol, LDL and HDL while a protein diet just increased HDL slightly but decreases only a third as much as the Carb heavy diet! So, if you have a normal cholesterol level, then a high protein diet can be better which will help you lose more fat, less muscle and also increase your HDL. If you have to lower your cholesterol too, then a CHO diet seems to be best option...

And now, we go to the gory details of the study...

They had four groups of women, as follows:
PRO group (30% protein diet), CHO group (15% protein diet), PRO-EX (30% protein diet with exercise) and CHO-EX (15% protein diet with exercise). Exercise consisted of 30 min walks for 5 days a week and 7 resistance training exercises (using Nautilus machines) at least 1 set of 12 repetitions with a weight chosen such that it fatigued the individual by the 12th repetition).

• Effect on Body Weight
  

The PRO and PRO-EX groups had a weight loss of maximum weight loss of 10.1 kg after 4 months while the CHO and CHO-EX lost 7.8 kg at the max). and the PRO-EX had the largest weight loss (11.2%) while CHO had the lowest (8.4%)!

• Effect on Body Composition
  

Regarding the body composition, the PRO and PRO-EX had lost a max of 8.1 kgs of fat while the CHO and CHO-EX group lost 5.6 kgs max.

they also concluded that Protein-diet and the exercise had an independent and an additive effect on the body composition and the PRO-EX group alone had lost 21.4% of their fat mass, while the CHO group lost only 12.8% of their fat mass!! Also, the CHO-EX group faired slightly better than the PRO group in terms of their fat loss!

Also, the fat in the trunk (torso, I guess) reduced the most in the PRO-EX group and the least in the CHO group.

And the PRO-EX group did not lose any muscle mass while the CHO group lost 5.4% of their muscle mass... I think this tells how dangerous, just dieting on a low-protein, carb-laden diet could do... If you lose such precious muscle mass, then your BMR would have come down and you can never go back to a much normal diet without gaining some fat!!!

• Effect on Blood Cholesterol

And here's some interesting news that has really opened a new area of research: how does the diet and exercise affect the Blood Cholesterol levels ? To my surprise, the CHO and CHO-EX group had a reduction in Total Cholesterol (9.2%) as well as LDL (10.4%) while the PRO and PRO-EX group had their Total Cholesterol reduced only by 3.7% and their LDL by a negligible 1.7%!

To add to the surprise, the CHO, CHO-EX and the PRO groups saw a decrease in HDL by 7.6%, 5.9% and 2.3% respectively, the PRO-EX group saw an increase in HDL by 4.1%!

I still have some doubts on whether these effects on blood cholesterol might be little bit different on men ? but we have to just wait for more studies to be made and I am sure this paper has opened a new area of research!

Now, get off your chair and do some exercise!! ;-)