Happenings

Hello Fellow Eagle Alums:

In my capacity as a sports doc, the most common questions I am asked by people “our age” involve losing weight. I’m almost never asked about gaining weight. That’s way too easy at this time in our lives. Whatever happened to the days when we could eat whatever we wanted, sleep till noon, then party all night and never gain an ounce? Well, as we all know by now, things change.

In my last blog entry I discussed the amount of exercise needed to maintain health. Bear in mind those were minimum numbers, and that all we were discussing was maintaining health, not improving fitness or losing weight. Unless you’re pretty sedentary now, doing those things will probably require an upward adjustment in the times.

Losing weight is primarily mathematics: you have to burn up more calories than you consume. I recognize that it is often much tougher than I’ve made it sound, but those are the basics. If the math doesn’t work out, then you probably won’t be very successful.

A recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, tried to shed a little light on how some of the more common weight loss diets worked. The study, performed in Israel, had their participants on one of three different diets: a low fat, calorie restricted diet similar to that recommended by the American Heart Association, a moderate fat, calorie restricted “Mediterranean” diet, and a low carbohydrate, non-calorie restricted diet similar to the Atkins diet. The study continued for two years, with the subjects eating their study diet only at lunch at their workplace cafeteria. The subjects, both men and women, were all moderately obese with a body mass index of 31. This works out to a 5’10” man weighing 215 lbs. or a 5’5” woman weighing 187 lbs. The study did not look at how much exercise the subjects did, if any.

The results showed that in two years, average weight loss was greatest in the “Atkins style” group with 10.3 pounds, and the Mediterranean group with 9.6 pounds. The low-fat group averaged 6.3 pounds lost. Cholesterol numbers varied too, with the “Atkins style” and Mediterranean doing better than the low fat group. Diabetic blood sugar control was best among the Mediterranean group.

Although this seems to be a fairly good endorsement for the low-carb Atkins style diet, there were problems. More of these participants dropped out of the study (22% after two years, compared with 15% for Mediterranean and 10% for low-fat). This suggests it may be harder to stay with this diet than the others, even though it was only for five meals per week. As I mentioned earlier, the study did not address the subjects exercise habits at all. Presumably, some did exercise, and I would expect these exercising individuals to show greater average weight loss than the averages for their groups.

So, although all the groups lost weight, it appears choice of diet regimen does matter. As always, talk to your personal physician before starting any exercise or diet program, and try to pick a program which you can stick to, and make it a lifestyle change.

Dr. John Felix, MD