Sloth and Gluttony Hard to Shake Even For the Healthy

Guy drinking beer. (Image credit: Stockxpert.)

The effects of a sedentary, gluttonous lifestyle are hard to shake, even after the person has become an upstanding, healthy individual, a new Swedish study suggests.

Researchers found that even a short period of overeating and a lack of exercise can have lasting effects on a person's physiology and make it harder to lose weight and keep it off.

At the study's start, the participants, whose average age was 26, had to be willing to gain between 5 percent and 15 percent of their weight in the name of science.

A second, control group ate and exercised as they normally would.

The couch-potato group added 14 pounds (6.4 kilograms) on average, with gains in both their body fat and their fat-free body mass. Six months after the group was allowed to go back to eating normally and exercising, they lost 71 percent of the gained weight, on average. [7 Diet Tricks That Really Work]

However, one year after the study period, those individuals still had more body fat than they did at the study's start.

For instance, compared with a baseline of about 20 percent body fat by weight, the gluttonous group had about 24 percent six months after the study period. And after a year, almost half of the body-fat increase was still there. Their fat-free body mass had dropped to baseline values by then.

The difference between the groups was even greater after 2.5 years, when participants in the overeating group showed a gain of 6.8 pounds (3.1 kg) from the baseline. Meanwhile, the control group didn't show any significant weight gain.

"The long-term difference in body weight in the intervention and control groups suggests that there is an extended effect on fat mass after a short period of large food consumption and minimal exercise," said study researcher Åsa Ernersson of Linköping University in Sweden.

The research was funded by the University Hospital of Linköping Research Funds, Linköping University, Gamla Tjänarinnor, Medical Research Council of Southeast Sweden, and the Diabetes Research Centre of Linköping University. The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Nutrition & Metabolism.

Jeanna Bryner is managing editor of Scientific American. Previously she was editor in chief of Live Science and, prior to that, an editor at Scholastic's Science World magazine. Bryner has an English degree from Salisbury University, a master's degree in biogeochemistry and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland and a graduate science journalism degree from New York University. She has worked as a biologist in Florida, where she monitored wetlands and did field surveys for endangered species, including the gorgeous Florida Scrub Jay. She also received an ocean sciences journalism fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a firm believer that science is for everyone and that just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.