Originally Posted by
InOmaha
I was fat and lost a bunch of weight by cycling and watching what I was eating. Then I started adding weight lifting and put on a ton of muscle weight almost to the same weight as when I was fat. I feel much better with the strength exercises added in and less cycling. I have much more energy and ability to function in general because lifting things is easy now. When I watched the Tour de France, the cyclists look sickly to me. I never want to look like that. I got down to 225 and I'm a rather powerful 250 now. It carries well enough on a 6'-3" frame.
What surprised me most about weight loss studies and the follow-up keeping weight off studies is how beneficial resistance training is to effective weight management. I read an article yesterday by a professor of exercise science that was a review of a study on calorie-restricted weight loss (800 kcal/day) of overweight women who were divided into three groups - aerobic exercise, resistance training, no exercise. The author included this statement about the study:
The study results clearly show that exercise training is critical for maintaining NEAT and AEE following weight loss, and thus confirms what many personal trainers know from their experience; that persons who go on 'diet only' interventions are quite susceptible weight regain following the diet.
The reason for this was that the "no exercise" group had a larger decrease in calorie expenditure caused by the weight loss than the other two groups and the resistance only had the lowest change.