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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. Hip & Thigh Diet PlansFor these diet plans to actually work, they would need to do one of two things.
Gender & Fat Storage & DistributionHowever, 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.
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 FlowWhat'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:
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.
Hip & Thigh Diets: ConclusionVirtually 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. Delicious Diet for Healthy Weight Loss Diet
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