Exercising but not losing weight? Do not despair.

For all of those who have hit a plateau in their weight loss, do not despair.  Professionals in Australian health promotion have found that overweight individuals that exercise regularly have greatly improved health prospects weather they are losing weight or not.

An experimental study of a new weight loss drug known as Tesofesine, has been shown to be twice as effective as other weight loss medications on the market.  Tesofesine, which works as an appetite suppressant, showed that in a study of 161 participants, the average weight loss over a 6 month study was between 3 – 13kg, depending on the dosage of the drug.  

Funded by Danish biopharmaceutical company Neurosearch in the hope of using testofesine as a weight loss drug, studies were carried out at University of Copenhagen.  Researcher and university MD, Arne Astrup said “Normally the drugs now on the market give you at best a weight loss of 5 kilograms (11 pounds) with diet and exercise. In this study we doubled that weight loss."

Tesofensine, which has previously been studied to treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, showed limited efficacy in treatment for these diseases, but significant weight loss in trial participants who were obese.  It works by affecting three different appetite regulatory centres of the brain, in the form of neurotransmitters noradrenaline, dopamine and serotonin.  

While the low carbohydrate diet showed faster results than the big breakfast diet, over the 8 month period the big breakfast group lost significantly more weight in the long term. The big breakfast diet group had lost on average 18 kg while the low carbohydrate group had lost 12.8kg by four months, but regained 8.2 kg by the eight month mark.

So the saying ‘breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper’ may actually hold true for effective long term weight loss.

If you were unsure of the benefits of interval training, this may change your mind!

An article in the Daily Telegraph told of Researchers from the University of NSW that have discovered an interval training routine that burns fat three times faster than regular exercise routines.

The study compared overweight women exercising at a continuous, regular pace for 40 minutes with women on a 20 minute interval cycling regimen.

The women taking part in the interval regimen lost three times as much weight over 15 weeks than those taking part in the regular exercise routine.  So not only did they lose more weight, but they spent only half the time in the gym!

Jamie Oliver’s fascinating series on how to "eat to save your life" has captured the nation's interest with some wonderful insight into the consequence of poor eating and the remedial action required to improve health and fitness. 

The series looks at the science of what food does to your body to help change the way you live your life. There are a number of dramatic demonstrations, which includes the autopsy of a 25-stone man (165kg), who quite literally ate himself to death. Jamie Oliver, Dr Catherine Spencer Smith (physician and fitness expert), Jane Clarke (nutritionist) and Dr Gunther von Hagens (anatomist) explore the eating habits of 18 ordinary people from the British public.  Most of them hardly eat vegetables but generally speaking considered themselves fit and at the beginning of the show had no real intension of changing their diet. This was all about to change one they saw how the food they were eating was affecting their body.