Tipping the scale: don't follow a weight-loss plan designed for a man! Use this advice tailored to suit the female form - achieving weight maintenance

Muscle & Fitness/Hers, June, 2002 by Beth Sonnenburg

as I was browsing around a trade show in Vegas a few weeks ago, a man from the Tanita company motioned to my finance and me. "Want to get your bodyfat tested? he asked Michael. Sure," he said, without blinking an eye. He took off his socks and shoes and eagerly stepped on the high-tech scale, which first displayed his weight and seconds later calculated his bodyfat percentage--disturbingly low for someone whose primary physical activity is pacing around his office. "Do you want to try?" asked the Tanita man (obviously either single or dating a swimsuit model). "Hell, no!" I retorted. Getting weighed in public is bad enough, but in the middle of the day, after breakfast, fully clothed?

It was definitely a case of Mars and Venus on the scale.

Days later, still boggled that my Coke-swilling, BBQ-chip-eating finance can hop on the scale without a care while I snack on carrot sticks and diet soda, I get more bad news. A professor tells me about an extensive research study in which groups of men and women exercised on a treadmill 45 minutes a day, five days a week, at 70% intensity. After 16 months, the men had lost an average 8-10 pounds. The women lost no weight at all.

There is no justice.

The more information I discover about "weight loss between the sexes," the more I wonder: Do women have to work twice as hard as men to get the same result?

The simple answer may indeed be yes--if you're following a plan made for a man. Women's bodies truly do need women's wisdom when it comes to weight management; simple equations and one-size-fits-all diets just don't work. Don't make your body fit into a plan designed for a man! Use these five principles of women's weight management to tailor your program for lasting success.

men generally burn more calories than women in a given activity.

The treadmill study mentioned before involved an unprecedented amount of exercise in a controlled environment, yet the women lost no weight at all while the men lost an average of 8-10 pounds, In the control group (which did no supervised exercise), men maintained their weight while the women gained an average of 5 pounds. Depressing, I know.

Lead researcher Joseph Donnelly, EdD, director of the Energy Balance Laboratory at the University of Kansas (Lawrence), explains that two possible mechanisms may be responsible for the outcome. "First, due to body size, females do not expend the same amount of energy for similar work compared to males. If you prescribe, for example, 45 minutes of treadmill walking at 75% of [maximal oxygen capacity], you will get a greater energy expenditure for males compared to females. Thus, using this common method of prescription, females must do more exercise than males to achieve similar energy expenditure--either by greater duration or intensity"

"For the most part, men have more muscle mass than women and for every step a man takes, he's going to bum more energy than every step a woman takes," adds John Jakicic, PhD, associate professor at Brown University's Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center (Providence, Rhode Island).

nutrition counts.

The second mechanism that could be responsible for the study outcome relates to diet. "We have some indication that females compensate more with increased energy intake compared to males," Donnelly stares. Diet was nor restricted in this study, so it's possible the women increased their food intake, thus negating the effects of their exercise regimen.

Donnelly explains that dietary restriction may be more than just a good suggestion for women looking to lose weight--it could be a necessity "The question is how much restriction [if a woman is also exercising]," he says. "I would argue the answer is absolutely unknown from a scientific standpoint."

Most research concludes that exercise alone does not result in weight loss, either short- or long-term. Think about it: Even if you do 60 minutes of cardio per day, you still have 23 additional hours to erase the calories you burned while exercising. Jakicic concurs: "What this study potentially suggests is that when women start an exercise program, they need to be more tuned in to their eating behaviors to make sure those aren't changing in ways that are going to counter-balance the activity they're doing. Our data suggest that if you're exercising and you're watching what you're eating, you'll keep the weight off."

you can't rely on equations.

In virtually every magazine article, book and pamphlet about weight loss (including our own), you'll read that a 3,500-calorie deficit equals a 1-pound weight loss: Cut 500 calories a day for seven days and you'll emerge 1 pound lighter. As you've probably personally experienced, it's nor always so cur and dried.

"Our bodies are not an equation," sums up Debra Waterhouse, MPH, PD, author of Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell (Warner, 1993) and Outsmarting the Midlife Fat Cell (Hyperion, 1999). "It's nor an exact science."

Waterhouse notes that although the equation might work in a laboratory, a rat or a test tube, the human body is dynamic rather than sratic. "A woman's body is much more extraordinary in these circumstances than a man's. We have fluctuating hormones, we have the premenstrual time, we have the peri-menopausal time, and we have pregnancy and breast-feeding. A woman's body is constantly changing."