The Problem With Weight Loss: Women Lose Muscle, Regain Fat

For post menopausal women, shedding pounds is often a bad deal. That’s because, as researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have learned, weight-losing women of a certain age often lose pounds in muscle and regain them in fat. A Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center news release reports that when researchers studied the muscle to fat ratios of  78 postmenopausal women (average age 58) who lost an average of 12 percent of their body weight by dieting, they found that 67 percent of the weight lost was fat and 33 percent was muscle. So far so good. But 12 months later, when the researchers looked at the weight regained, they found that 81 percent was fat and 19 percent was muscle. On average, by 12 months after the drop in weight, 26 percent of fat lost was regained, whereas only six percent of muscle lost was regained.  The researchers point out that the study subjects were sedentary and abdominally obese, and the results of the research may not apply to more active people or to men. Read more from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.