Did you know that a low-calorie diet does not have the same benefits for men and women?

One of the best ways one can lose some weight is to go on a diet. These days wherever you turn, you'll find about some fad diet that claims it can provide you with amazing results and fast. However, not all of these diets work for everyone. One such diet is the low-calorie diet. For those uninitiated, a low-calorie diet requires eating about 800 calories a day or fewer. Mostly the diet requires you to replace normal food with low-calorie options like shakes, soups, bars or porridge etc.

While it's already known that the same diet might not have the same results for everyone, researchers have now found that it might not even have the same results on men and women. A study was conducted on over 2000 participants who were overweight and pre-diabetic. These participants were asked to follow a low-calorie diet for about 8 weeks post which the results were accounted for.

It was found that men lost a lot more body weight than women did. In fact, they even had larger reductions in a metabolic syndrome score, a diabetes indicator, fat mass, and heart rate. Women, on the other hand, showed larger reductions in HDL-cholesterol, lean body mass, hip circumference and pulse pressure as compared to men.

“Despite adjusting for the differences in weight loss, it appears that men benefitted more from the intervention than women. Whether differences between genders persist in the long-term and whether we will need to design different interventions depending on gender will be interesting to follow,” said lead author Dr Pia Christensen. “However, the 8-week low-energy diet in individuals with pre-diabetes did result in the initial 10 per cent weight loss needed to achieve major metabolic improvement in the first phase of a diabetes prevention programme,” concluded Christensen. Stay tuned for more updates.