Prescription for Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain

My father used to have a saying about quitting cigarettes. "It's easy to stop smoking", he'd say, ruefully. "I've done it a million times."

If you've ever lost weight, you probably know exactly what he meant.

One of the biggest problems with weight loss isn't losing the weight in the first place, it's keeping it off. And while I've written in the past that exercise is not the most efficient way to lose weight, it may just be the magic bullet when it comes to keeping it off.

Dr. Paul McLean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine studies the metabolism of rats so that he can learn more about the metabolism of humans. In one study, he got his rats to be nice and fat and then put them on a "low-fat, low-calorie" diet causing weight loss. Then he put them through the rat version of our holiday season: He allowed them to gorge on unlimited amounts of food. Big surprise -- they got fat again.Then he took the newly-fat-again rats and divided them into two groups. One group behaved like couch potatoes, and the other group was given a daily bout of exercise. According to MacLean, the exercise changed the rats' metabolism. "It lowered their hunger that they were experiencing on a daily basis", he said. "It changed their biology."

The study also found that by exercising, the increase in the number of fat cells that usually occurs during weight regain was prevented. This is huge -- since conventional wisdom has always held that the number of fat cells you're stuck with can't be changed or altered by diet or lifestyle choices. MacLean thinks that the exercising rats stayed thinner not because -- as you might assume -- they were burning calories, or at least not just because they were burning calories. He believes the exercise program actually changed their biological drive to eat, even slightly suppressing it.

According to Science Daily, these physiological changes may make it easier to stay on a diet because your body and mind can reprogram what it considers an optimal weight. So far, this is just a theory. And others have argued the opposite, saying that exercise makes us hungrier, and unless we're careful, we over-compensate for the calories we burn during workouts by eating more food than we would if we hadn't exercised in the first place. But one fact is clear --according to the National Weight Control Registry, exercise is the a strategy without which weight maintenance is darn near impossible.

The moral of the story -- the holiday season is exactly the time you don't want to throw your exercise program out the window. In fact, you might want to increase it.

For more tips on health, weight loss and nutrition, visit Jonny Bowden Solutions.

Jonny Bowden, author, nutritionist and weight loss coach cuts through all the misconceptions about diet and fitness to help you transform your body, your health and your life.