Slayer's Den

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Curcumin Limits Fat Regain​

It's tough to get ripped and even tougher to prevent post-diet fat gain. But one natural substance makes it easier to keep your abs.​

Ending a strict diet is good. You're ripped and you look great, and now it'll be easier to put on muscle. But finishing up a cutting phase is also bad. After all, it's very difficult to stay shredded, and you can't stay on a severely restrictive diet forever. Soon, that newly discovered six-pack turns into a four-pack. If you're not careful, you might soon have a keg.

Recent research, though, suggests that taking curcumin after a calorie-restriction diet might limit the amount of fat you regain, even if for some reason you stop training, too.

The Study​

This was a rat study, but don't poo-poo it just yet. Rat physiology is similar to ours and you can carefully monitor their every waking and sleeping moment because they live in little cages. You can't do that with humans. They'd object.

Scientists took rats and split them into two groups. One group was on a calorie-restriction diet and had 24-hour access to a running wheel. The other group didn't have a wheel and they got to eat as much as they wanted. After three weeks, the groups had their running wheels locked and were reintroduced to ad libitum (as much as they wanted) feeding for a week.

Additionally, one of these groups received a daily dose of curcumin while the other group received a placebo.


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What Happened​

When the rats no longer got to exercise and were given as much as they wanted to eat, body mass naturally increased, accompanied by a 9 to 14-fold increase in epdidymal, perirneal, and inguinal adipose tissue. In other words, they gained fat. However, the group receiving curcumin didn't get as fat.

Furthermore, the curcumin-fed rats had a much more favorable insulin curve and much lower C-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation) than the non-curcumin group.

The researchers concluded: "Curcumin has a protective effect against weight regain and impaired metabolic control following weight loss, perhaps via inhibition of glucocorticoid action and inflammation."

How to Use This Info​

Most people, upon cessation of a diet, probably don't abruptly revert back to previous bad eating habits. Instead, they'd gradually relax their diets and slowly start to put the pounds back on. Even so, there's ample reason to think that curcumin would work equally well in preventing post-diet fat gain in humans.

One eyebrow-raising aspect of the rat study was the amount of curcumin administered. The dosage was 200 mg/kg, which translates to 18,000 mg. for a 200-pound person. That's about thirty-six 500-mg. capsules per day of plain curcumin. Don't freak out, though. There's an easy solution.

Plain-old curcumin is notoriously hard to absorb for rats and humans alike, so the researchers had to overdose the rats to ensure they got a therapeutic dosage. If the researchers had used micellar curcumin, they could have greatly increased absorption and bioavailability, thus negating the need for such big doses.