Every week over the past several months, a new volunteer has checked into the “metabolic ward” at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. The goal: To not only lose weight but find a way to keep it off.
During each person’s 24-day stay in the inpatient unit, he or she is fed carefully prepared meals that are meticulously measured down to the calorie so that the daily total caloric consumption will be less than what the individual’s body burns, resulting in weight loss.
It’s all part of a study Pennington is conducting to discover how to help people keep weight off, as detailed in new Men’sHealth feature focused on the research in Baton Rouge.
“Each of the 15 people in the study starts by spending three days inside one of Pennington’s four metabolic chambers. Eric Ravussin, Ph.D., a professor of physiology, genially describes them as ‘like hotel rooms, but with a glass wall and precise sensors,’” Men’sHealth reports.
Ravussin is measuring not only how much weight each subject drops but also how the metabolic rate is affected by cutting back on calories. Ravussin made headlines with a recent Biggest Loser study that revealed the dramatic drop in calorie burn rate of participants on the show was well below that of individuals who had always been at that weight.
In other words, a person who weighed 250 pounds and lost 50 pounds would have to eat less than a person who always weighed 200 pounds.
Ravussin is working to develop a drug that can help keep metabolisms from dropping, to help people keep the weight off.
