Why the pill can stop fat loss and fitness....

Today's post: Friday, 4-17-2009

In today’s health news, several news services carried the story that young women taking birth control pills who did strength training well and ate enough protein to add some muscle mass (which helps reduce fat by competing with it for calories) failed to do so as well as a group of women who were NOT taking birth control pills while they were on the same exercise and diet program exactly.

The story was reported by several of the online news services that do health stories and Reuters actually had the story twice – one story written in Chicago & one written in New York.

In the study, 73 healthy young women from 18 to 31 years did a strength training routine 3 times per week for 10 weeks. Thirty-four of the women took the birth control pill and 39 didn’t. To ensure they got enough protein, both groups were told to eat at least half a gram of protein for each pound of bodyweight every day.

Lean muscle went up 2.1 % in the woman taking birth control pills and 3.5 % in the women who did not.

Blood samples before and after the exercise sessions found that the women taking the pill had lower levels of testosterone (which helps build muscle) & much higher levels of cortisol.

And the story said that high levels of cortisol tend to block muscle increases. (We also know that high levels of cortisol tend to cause you to gain belly fat.)

It’s also been in the news in the past year or so that taking birth control pills tends to cause women to be attracted to men less well matched to them than women who don’t. (Without taking the pill women tend to be attracted to men who have immune systems with different strengths so their children have a good chance of getting an immune system strong in both areas. Women taking the pill tend to be attracted to men with similar immune systems which is thought to produce children with less effective immune systems.) This also means that a woman takes the pill who marries a man who attracts her may feel less attracted when she stops taking the pill later to have children.

So what to do with this information?

1. The first thing that jumps out at me is that despite the attention grabbing headlines, doing the strength training while eating enough protein did improve the muscle mass of BOTH groups even though it did it better for women not taking the pill. Plus this was only a 10 week program so a 100 week program might well do much better in terms of the results for both sets of women. (The best alternative for health and fat loss is to simply keep doing it every week and not stop.)

That specifically means that women who take the pill and continue to do so or plan to do so can still get good results from this kind of strength training program. They got more than half the results, 60 % of results, of the women not taking the pill. The strength training was still well worth doing for both groups.

2. The high cortisol readings though were more of a problem though. Women who want to look good and women who want to stay healthy want to avoid unnecessary belly fat because it both makes you look fat and tends to cause unhealthy changes to your blood fats that increase your risk of heart disease.

Some supplements may lower cortisol. Effective stress relief lowers cortisol including, according to another story today, watching half an hour of a video the woman (or man) watching it finds funny & chooses for themselves.

So, for women who plan to keep taking the pill those are solutions worth considering.

3. The other possibility is to use a different method of contraception other than taking birth control pills.

For women who are married the IUD or inter uterine device is almost as effective as the pill; and for single women who only have sex occasionally the IUD plus taking the morning after pill just after they have sex is as effective as the birth control pill as well.

This doesn’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases but taking the birth control pill doesn’t either. One possible solution is to use a female condom and an IUD. There is now an improved version; and if it’s used with some extra lubrication such as Astroglide on the side the man feels, it can be a decent alternative.

4. The other possibility for women who want to take the birth control pill is to work harder at the strength training and other steps that cause fat loss.

For example, such women could do upper body strength training 3 days a week and then do leg exercise 3 days week. If each session was comparable to ones in the study in amount of exercises done, that would be twice as much strength training and likely cause a 4.2 % increase in muscle mass, double the 2.1 % from 3 days a week.

To overcome the fat gain from the cortisol increase, one solution would be to have the woman watch a video she finds funny while walking on a treadmill for half an hour each day. The extra calories burned plus the cortisol reduction would likely do quite well.

Eating much less refined grains and far fewer foods made from them plus ingesting dramatically less sugar and high fructose corn syrup and any kind of soft drinks would also tend to combat the effect of the extra cortisol. (Those foods tend to increase belly fat and heart disease when eaten often every day.)

5. It also helps to be sure, for women who take the pill, that they take a version which has the lowest effective dose of the hormones involved. (Now that lower dosages are usually used, women experience less fat gain and fewer side effects from taking birth control pills.)

So, this information is important. Women can use it productively if they switch to another birth control method that they are comfortable with. Or they can use it productively by taking steps to counteract the effect.

Both solutions have trade offs. So a woman needs to choose the alternative she likes best.