Research Found How People With Difficult-to-Treat Obesity Can Lose Weight
If You’ve Struggled to Lose Weight Despite Following the Rules, You’re Not Failing—the Approach Is.
We’ve all heard it before—eat less, move more if you want to lose weight. But what if you’re cutting back on food, following the plan to the letter, and the scale still won’t budge?
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. New research confirms that for some people, diet alone simply isn’t enough.
A study published in eBioMedicine found that a certain group of people with obesity struggle to lose weight through dieting alone. The good news? Exercise makes all the difference.
Why Exercise Helped When Diet Alone Didn’t
To do this, they analyzed past data from a weight-loss program and identified two groups:
Diet-resistant (DR) individuals: the bottom 20% of participants who lost little to no weight despite strictly following a low-calorie diet.
Diet-sensitive (DS) individuals: the top 20% who responded well to calorie restriction and lost weight as expected.
They then invited 10 matched pairs of participants, ensuring they were similar in age, body mass, and BMI. Each group followed the same six-week exercise program to see how their bodies would respond.
And the results? Neither group lost additional weight—but exercise changed everything for diet-resistant individuals.
While diet-sensitive participants saw little extra change, the diet-resistant group experienced significant fat loss, a smaller waistline, and a lower body fat percentage.
Their muscles became better at using energy, their fat-burning ability improved, and they developed more endurance-friendly muscle fibers. Exercise essentially “retrained” their bodies to process fat and energy more efficiently, making weight loss possible where diet alone had failed.
So, why was diet alone ineffective? Diet-resistant individuals had more body fat, less muscle, and fewer mitochondria—the tiny powerhouses in cells that help turn food into energy. This made it harder for their bodies to burn fat efficiently.
Meanwhile, diet-sensitive individuals naturally burned fat more easily, which is why they lost weight through diet alone.
Interestingly, while diet-resistant individuals had more total body fat, diet-sensitive women had a larger waist circumference. This means they carried more visceral fat—the deeper belly fat wrapped around internal organs. This type of fat is strongly linked to metabolic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
Even though diet-sensitive women lost weight faster, they started with higher visceral fat, insulin resistance, and triglycerides—factors that increase the risk of metabolic syndrome.
So, while diet-resistant individuals needed exercise to lose fat, diet-sensitive individuals were already at greater risk for future metabolic diseases, even though they lost weight more quickly.
Why This Study Matters
If you’ve ever struggled with weight loss despite following every rule in the book, this study might explain why.
For decades, people with obesity have been shamed and told that weight loss is just about “eating less and trying harder.” And when diets don’t work, they’re blamed for not being disciplined enough.
But this research proves otherwise—some bodies simply don’t respond to calorie restriction the same way.
Traditional diets focus on cutting calories to create a deficit, which works for many people. But for those who are diet-resistant, their muscle function and metabolism require a different approach.
If you’ve been doing everything “right” and still not seeing results, it’s not your fault. Instead of blaming yourself, this study offers hope—it’s not that you’re failing, it’s that your body needs something different.
“For those individuals who have obesity and who’ve had enormous difficulty losing weight, the message for them is: You are in a group of individuals for whom exercise is particularly important. And that’s really going to help you lose weight,” said Dr. Ruth McPherson, a professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine and co-author of the study.
These findings highlight the importance of personalized weight management programs. If diet alone doesn’t work for you, it’s not your fault—it’s just a sign that your body needs a different strategy.
Exercise Is Key
If you’ve struggled to lose weight despite rigidly following a diet, this study suggests you might be diet-resistant—and that’s okay.
Instead of doubling down on food restriction, shifting your focus to movement may be the breakthrough you need.
Exercise, particularly a combination of aerobic and exercise training, can be the missing key to reprogramming your muscles to begin burning more energy.
The bottom line is this: Weight loss isn’t one-size-fits-all—and it’s time we stop treating it like it is.
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