Why there's more to weight loss than the number on the scale

By Sam Downing|

A long-term study has revealed the best eating plan to follow to cut the most dangerous type of fat.

Six months after you set out to lose weight, you step on the scales and see you've only lost a few kilos. But don't be discouraged — that number might not reflect how much healthier you actually are, according to a new study.

But that research also concluded how you lose the weight matters, revealing a diet rich in unsaturated fats and low in carbohydrates will leave you best off.

For a long-term trial, a team based out of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel recruited almost 300 workers from a nearby nuclear research centre and regularly fed them one of two lunches: a Mediterranean-style lunch low in carbs that included a handful of walnuts as a snack, or a low-fat lunch.

The participants were also given optional free gym memberships to work out three times a week at a moderate intensity.

The researchers were particularly keen to find out how the two diets affected fat distribution. Your body stores it in two different ways: subcutaneous fat is the jiggly type right under your skin; while visceral fat is the more solid type deep inside your abdomen.

Visceral fat is the bad kind: packed in around your organs, it's linked to an increase in cardiovascular disease and diabetes, among other maladies.

MRI scans taken at six and 18 months into the trial revealed that the Mediterranean/low-carb diet had a significantly more positive health impact: even if its adherents didn't lose much fat overall, they lost far more visceral fat — particularly the fat stored around their livers and hearts.

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That squares with past research finding that even losing modest amounts of weight has big benefits.

“Weighing patients or using blood tests to detect changes, hasn’t, until now, given us accurate pictures, literally, of how different fat deposits are impacted disproportionately by diet and exercise,” said Professor Iris Shai, the trial's primary investigator, in a statement.

“These findings suggest that moderate exercise combined with a Mediterranean/low carb diet may help reduce the amount of some fat deposits even if you don’t lose significant weight as part of the effort.”

The Mediterranean diet, characterised by lots of olive oil, seafood, fruit, vegetables, legumes and grains, in consistently hailed as one of the healthiest ways to eat — and also one of the simplest to stick to in the long term.

The study is published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

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