Seven weeks to reducing your belly fat
A combination of interval training and eating only within fixed times of the day could be the key to getting rid of dangerous belly fat.
It’s that time of year again.
The New Year has come and gone, and most folks have experienced that the holidays have made them a few kilos heavier. What now?
Recipes for weight loss abound.
One recent popular approach on the weight loss front is time-restricted eating, which means that you limit your daily calorie intake window.
For example, you might only eat for ten out of the 24 hours in a day, and not eat between 18:00 in the evening and 08:00 the next day.
But does the strategy work?
“Yes,” says Trine Moholdt, who heads the Exercise, Cardiometabolic Health and Reproduction Research Group (EXCAR) at NTNU.
Eat anything you want
Moholdt’s group has recently published a large study in which the research team looked at the effects of time-restricted eating and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) in overweight and obese women.
“A lot of the participants experienced an increased feeling of hunger in the evening during the first two weeks, but after seven weeks they had gotten used to not eating in the evening,” says research group leader Trine Moholdt at NTNU. Photo: Karl Jørgen Marthinsen, NTNU
The participants were allowed to eat whatever they wanted and as much as they wanted, but all their calorie intake had to take place within a ten-hour maximum time window.
“Numerous studies have shown positive health effects of time-limited eating and HIIT individually. We wanted to see if combining these two lifestyle changes is more effective than just one of them alone. Few previous studies have done that,” says Moholdt.
The study included 131 women and lasted for seven weeks. The women were divided into three groups:
High-intensity interval training: Participants trained for 35 minutes three times each week. They completed two sessions of 4 x 4-minute interval training and one session of 10 x 1-minute segments. The participants trained at over 90 per cent of their maximum heart rate during the high-intensity interval run segments.
Combination group: Participants combined high-intensity interval training and time-restricted eating.
Control group: This group ate and exercised as they normally did.
The combination group ended up with the best results.
Lost more belly fat than other groups
“We found significantly reduced long-term blood sugar in the combination group participants. Their decrease in weight, fat mass and visceral fat was also almost twice as great as in the other two intervention groups. They also improved their oxygen uptake,” says Moholdt.
Do you find it easier to eat healthy foods during the day? You’re not alone. That’s why it might be a good idea not to eat in the evening. Not too many people want crisps and beer for lunch, says research group leader Trine Moholdt at NTNU. Illustration photo: Colourbox
Visceral fat is the fatty tissue that surrounds the internal organs in the abdominal cavity.
This fat is considered the most dangerous because the fat cells around the stomach can create proteins that trigger inflammation in the body. This can in turn increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression and dementia.
Even if you can’t use exercises like sit-ups to target the specific parts of your body where you want to lose weight, studies have shown that abdominal fat in particular can be reduced more by exercise than fat in other parts of the body can. The NTNU study confirms this finding.
- You might also like: Exercise advice and exercise programs from NTNU
Exercise + dieting = best outcome
It is important to exercise while losing weight. Everyone who participated in an exercise group during the study was followed up by the research team with training at NTNU. Now the researchers will investigate how using digital exercise tools for follow-up works. Illustration photo: Colourbox
“The risk of losing weight without exercising is that you’ll lose a lot of muscle mass, which isn’t advisable. Starting with both time-limited eating and high-intensity interval training can be a good idea if you want to quickly improve your health and reduce the risk of disease,” says Moholdt.
All the participants who joined an exercise group were followed up by the researchers. They had to attend the training laboratories at NTNU and received guidance from the research team that led the training.
“A lot of the participants said that it really helped to have someone who held them accountable and that they had to report to. Now we’re starting a study where they’ll train on their own with only weekly digital follow-up,” says Moholdt.
Test your own fitness and fitness age here.
Watch a video that summarizes the article:
Reference: Kamilla L. Haganes, Trine Moholdt et al: Time-restricted eating and exercise training improve HbA1c and body composition in women with overweight/obesity: A randomized controlled trial, Cell Metabolism. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2022.09.003
