Count Calories to Cut Flab

According to a US study, people looking forward to losing weight tend to overlook the number of calories they consume in lieu of keeping a check on cutting consumption of fat, protein and carbohydrates. The study conducted by researchers, which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, revealed that there was no difference in weight loss or reduction of fat consumption between four diets with different proportions of fat, protein and carbohydrates.  

The study said that weight loss was better in those, who adhered better, and therefore, a major predictor of weight loss was adherence. George Bray from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who worked on the study, said that participants, who adhered better, lost weight easily.

Researches that were done earlier found out that certain diets especially those with very low carbohydrates worked better than other diets though Bray mentioned that there had been no consensus among the scientists about the same. To conduct the study, Bray along with his colleagues subjected hundreds of random overweight or obese people to one of the four diets, which include average protein, higher carbs and low fat; high protein, higher carbs and low fat; average protein, lower carbs and high fat and high protein, lower carbs and high fat. Each of the four diets was made to cut about 750 calories a day. The researchers tested the weight, lean mass and fat mass of the participants after 6 months and later two years into the diet program. It was observed that at 6 months, people lost more than 4.1 kg of fat and 2.3 kg of lean mass, a bit of which was regained when they were tested after two years. The study revealed that people maintained a weight loss of 3.6 kg after 2 years of which 1.4 kg loss was associated with abdominal fat.