It has started raining again and it has become a little cooler however, a month off going to the gym or breaking your healthy diet to comfort binge will affect your body and produce long lasting results. Dr Torbjorn Lindstrom from the faculty of health sciences at the University of Linkoping, and his team of Swedish researchers discovered that shorter periods of overeating will have longer term effects.
The current issue of Nutrition and Metabolism details their research methods. They took 18 individuals of the same age and all of a normal weight including 12 men and six women. All were placed on a minimum daily exercise routine which did not allow them to take more than 5,000 steps per day. To put this into perspective, generally people who are concerned about their fitness aim to take 10,000 steps per day. The average person wearing a pedometer while going about their daily activities may note that they are walking on average 4,000 and 6,000 steps per day not including sport. You can double this number by doing approximately half an hour to forty minutes of walking outside your daily routine.
The participants also had to increase their daily intake of calories by 70%, bringing their consumption to 5750 calories per day. In order to consume this number of calories, one would have to eat something like 8 meals per day at approximately 700 calories per meal. These individuals put on 14 pounds in one month. Another group of the same age and of normal weights did not change their diet or physical activity.
After 6 months, the group that increased their calorific intake lost 10 pounds on average but after one year they noticed that they still had a 3 pound gain of fat mass. This weight remained despite returning to their low calorie diets and physically active lifestyles.
Two and a half years later, the gain in fat mass on the same individuals was even greater. The average gain was approximately 7 pounds. This was not the case for those who had kept their original dietary habits. They remained the same weight.
The results show that a brief period of binge eating and cutting out recommended levels of physical activity simultaneously, can actually change the composition of the body and make it more difficult to get rid of the weight gained.