Workouts make your insides fitter, but you’ll weigh same

EXERCISING may not help you lose weight – but it will rid you of hidden fat stored around your internal organs, a study found.

Carrying out between two to six months of endurance training led test subjects to lose either nothing or a tiny amount of weight, research revealed.

But it cut their ‘visceral fat’ that cloaks organs and can cause health problems – particularly type 2 diabetes and heart and circulatory disease.

The findings show how some people can appear healthy but are ‘thin on the outside and fat on the inside’.

Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University and Radboud University in the Netherlands evaluated 117 recent studies. They found that after the training, subjects’ average weight loss was just one per cent of their total weight – ranging between zero and 8.8lbs.

But there was a six per cent reduction in their visceral fat. One explanation was that exercise increases muscle – which weighs more than fat.

To illustrate the difference, the authors said that if you lost five per cent in body weight after exercise training, you would reduce your visceral fat by 21.3 per cent.

But if you lost five per cent by calorie reduction alone, your visceral fat would drop by just 13.4 per cent.

In the journal Obesity Reviews, the authors discovered that calorie reduction – or dieting – resulted in more weight loss than exercise.

They argue that while we are often advised to lose weight, visceral fat may be a bigger threat to our health. And doctors should not think that just because exercise has not reduced a patient’s weight it has been ineffective, they warned.

The experts noted: ‘Our data therefore strongly indicate that, in clinical practice, caution should be taken when interpreting (lack in) changes of body weight after exercise training interventions.

‘Incorrect conclusions can potentially lead to recommendations or suggestions that the exercise intervention was unsuccessful, despite the presence of a marked effect on body composition.’

Professor Dick Thijssen, co-author of the research, said: ‘These results clearly demonstrate that the powerful effect of exercise training on your body composition cannot be detected by your weighing scale.

‘Don’t let your weighing scale mislead you, especially when exercise training caused you to be fitter, resulted in a better fit in your old jeans and markedly improved your health risks.’

‘Don’t let scales mislead you’