Do You Need to Exercise While On Weight Loss Drugs?
The new weight-loss drugs that suppress appetite and reduce food cravings can be quite effective at helping people drop pounds, with many losing at least 10 or 20% of their body weight while they take the medications.But in the real world and despite the drugs’ effectiveness, as many as half of users quit the drugs within a year, studies show, because of their expense, side effects or for other reasons.
Afterward, the pounds almost invariably creep back, and, almost as worrying, the weight people regain tends to be almost exclusively fat, with little muscle. The result is that they are often metabolically less healthy than before they’d begun the drugs. But an important, new, long-term study of people who used and then quit one of the weight-loss drugs suggests there may be a simple, accessible way to stave off unhealthy weight regain after stopping the drugs: exercise.
In the study, people who exercised while using a weight-loss drug kept off far more of their weight after quitting the medication than people who didn’t work out, and they maintained more muscle.
Excerpted from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
