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If you successfully got rid of some unwanted weight during your New Year's resolution, a new and daunting question might have been brought to the surface: how do you keep off the weight?
Here is one basic fact that a lot of people don't understand: when you lose weight, your body burns more calories naturally. That means that you have to work harder to keep getting the same results overtime.
Weird, right? You would think that the less you weight, the less effort your body has to put out to function, but that's simply not true.
According to Cosmopolitan, researchers from University of Alabama at Birmingham recently "put 140 overweight women on an 800-calorie-per-day weight-loss diet and one of three supervised exercise programs: One group had to do 40 minutes of cardio on a treadmill three times per week; one group did resistance training (two 10-rep sets of resistance training exercises, including squats, leg extensions, leg curls, biceps curls, triceps extensions, lateral pull-downs, bench presses, overhead presses, lower back extensions, and sit-ups) three times per week; and one group didn't exercise at all."
After the participants fell into the "normal" BMI range, they were put on a less restrictive diet and asked to still go to the gym as prescribed for four more weeks. Before and after they started the experiment, researchers measured how much energy each women used at rest and from moving around on her own, outside of the prescribed exercise. The results are definitely not what you would expect.
As was expected, the women who did not exercise burned less calories during their normal everyday activities than the women who did workout. Why? They moved around less than the women that did exercise.
"This could be because their low-calorie diets led them to believe they had less energy," lead study author Gary Hunter, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at University of Alabama at Birmingham, told Cosmopolitan.
The women who did exercise found that their metabolisms slowed down a bit (as expected) but those that did the resistance training fared much better in particular. They ended up moving more outside of the gym which, in turn, burned more calories.
"While you might feel like plopping down on the couch the second you get home from the gym," Hunter says, "resistance training actually has the opposite effect: It gives you the strength to walk around with more ease, which enables (and evidently, encourages) you to be more physically active throughout the day. And taking a few extra steps here and there can help you keep excess weight off for good."
There you have it! Resistance training will get you moving around more outside of the gym which means that you'll keep the weight off!
What do you think about this? Are you surprised? Let us know what you think in the comments!
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