Do hip and thigh diet plans really work?
Hip and thigh diet plans are supposed to help you lose weight from certain
areas of your body. Aimed specifically at women, there's no doubting
their popularity. Rosemary Conley's Hip and Thigh Diet, for example,
together with its imaginatively titled sequel, Rosemary Conley's
Complete Hip and Thigh Diet, have sold more than two million
copies since 1988.
Diet plans
For these diet plans to actually work, they would need to do one of two
things.
• Reduce the storage of fat in the hips and thighs relative to
other parts of your body.
• Increase the rate at which fat stored in your hips and thighs
is broken down and used for energy.
However, researchers from the Mayo Clinic have shown that gender is one
of the most important factors affecting where you store fat after a meal
- casting doubt on the notion that hip and thigh diet plans live up to
their claims.
Test subjects (12 men and 12 women) were given a liquid meal containing
carbohydrate, protein, and fat. The research team used a sophisticated
technique known as fatty acid "tracing". This allowed them to
establish precisely what happened to the fatty acids in the meal.
Results showed that women stored more fat in subcutaneous tissue than
men. Subcutaneous (pronounced sub-cue-tain-ee-us) tissue is the fat you
can pinch, and is stored directly under your skin.
• For every 10 grams of fat in the meal, women stored nearly 4
grams in subcutaneous tissue.
• Men, on the other hand, stored only 2.4 grams in subcutaneous
tissue.
However, this doesn't mean that the men got off the hook! It appears
that men store more visceral (pronounced viss-er-al) fat. Visceral fat
is the stuff that surrounds and protects your internal organs.
Japanese scientists have shown previously that dieting leads to a greater
reduction in visceral fat, whereas exercise has a greater impact on subcutaneous
fat. The loss of subcutaneous fat is far greater when you use exercise, rather
than dieting, to help you lose weight. There's also a link between exercise
frequency and the loss of subcutaneous fat. In other words, the more often you
exercise, the more subcutaneous fat you'll lose.
Blood flow
What's really interesting is that after the meal, the flow of blood to
fat stored in the thighs increased in women, but not in men. Variations
in blood flow could represent another reason why women store more fat
in their lower body than men. Indeed, the authors of the study comment
that,
"... greater blood flow could deliver more chylomicrons
to leg adipose tissue in women, potentially increasing the opportunity
for additional fat storage."
Chylomicrons (pronounced kile-o-my-krons) are "packages" of
fat "wrapped" in protein. Chylomicrons carry fat in the blood
after a meal.
Not only do women tend to store more fat in the hips and thighs than
men, it's also harder to get rid of once it's there! Previous
research shows that regional fat loss depends more on gender, rather
than the exercise program you follow.
• Men lose fat first from their trunk, then their arms, followed
by their legs.
• Weight loss in women appears to be greater in the arms, followed
by the trunk, then by the legs.
Virtually any diet, provided it's low in calories, will help you lose
weight. However, diet plans or training programs that promise to target
fat in your hips and thighs to a greater extent than fat in other parts
of your body are based more on emotional appeal than physiological fact.
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Reference
Romanski, S.A., Nelson, R.M., & Jensen, M.D. (2000). Meal
fatty acid uptake in adipose tissue: gender effects in nonobese
humans. American
Journal of Physiology, E279, E455-E462
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