A study had very interesting results: The obese people who wore a weighted vest lost weight after three weeks.
Wearing a weighted vest is a form of exercise that’s usually seen at gyms while people walk on a treadmill or use a stair stepping machine.
It strengthens the core and helps prepare people to wear weighted backpacks when hiking.
Wearing external weight around your midsection increases your body’s energy demands even when you go about the routine tasks of daily living.
Of course, for obese people, they have “built-in” excess weight around their middles. But this doesn’t mean that adding weight via external means can’t result in some loss of body fat.
Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, decided to find out just how much weight people can lose — by simply wearing a weighted vest throughout the day … without any dieting or other changes in lifestyle.
Small Study, Interesting Results
The 69 participants had a BMI of 30 to 35, which is the low end of obesity. For three weeks, they were to wear a weighted vest for eight hours a day, without making any other changes in their daily routines or eating habits.
Half the participants were randomly assigned to wear a vest weighing 2.2 lbs. (one kg.), and the other half wore a vest weighing 24.2 lbs. (11 kg.).
The group who wore the heavy vests, after three weeks, lost three and a half pounds (1.6 kg.), while the lighter vest group lost a bit more than half a pound (0.3 kg.).
In both groups, the lost weight was in the form of fat, not muscle.
The scientists were not able to determine how much of the loss, per individual, came from fat under the skin or fat in the belly.
The Amount of Weight Lost Was Puny
Only three and a half pounds? Yes, for all that trouble … wearing a vest eight hours a day for three weeks straight … it seems that this just wouldn’t be worth it because it’s not a sustainable practice.
The point of the experiment was to see how much weight someone could lose when incorporating a weighted vest into their daily routine.
One has to wonder, though, how much more weight could be lost by doubling the time wearing the 24 pound vest.
If you want to lose 10 pounds for an upcoming vacation, reunion or other event, this experiment makes it seem that you can pull this off by wearing a heavy vest eight hours a day for perhaps eight or nine weeks straight.
You can also lose 10 pounds by tweaking your exercise habits and/or eating fewer baked goods.
Losing 10 pounds in eight weeks may also result from simply giving up several hours a day of sitting time in exchange for walking (treadmill desk for computer work) and pacing while watching TV.
It should be no surprise that the researchers aren’t done here.
They want to explore the extent to which the fat reduction continues when the weighted vest is worn for longer periods of time, and how much of the lost weight comes from the harmful belly fat type.
Benefits of a Weighted Vest
Based on this study, it appears that relying on a weighted vest for fat loss would be cumbersome, non-sustainable and yield only minimal results during the wearing time period.
So if you want to bust body fat, you should rely upon sustainable methods such as the following:
- Intense strength training focusing on multi-joint movements such as squats, presses and pulls.
- High intensity interval training (brief difficult bursts mixed with longer recovery periods).
- Portion control with food; cutting back on processed foods and snacking more on fruits and nuts.
- Practicing mindful eating (e.g., don’t eat just because you’re watching TV, using a computer or other people in the room are munching).
The weighted vest can still be incorporated into your exercise program.
Perhaps you can wear it on your fitness or dog walks or even during interval training on cardio equipment.
You may want to wear it during a group fitness class, while doing yoga or while doing a brief morning walk on your treadmill.
But it makes little sense to wear it eight hours a day for a prolonged time, especially since it requires a significant load (24 pounds) to incite that three and a half pound weight loss.
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