The effects of exercise interventions on weight regain after weight loss: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Jiachen Wang, Yun Chen, Kai Xu, Jiansong Dai · 2026
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Description
Jiachen Wang and three colleagues pool trials on a familiar frustration: weight lost through diet, drugs, or surgery tends to creep back. Their 2026 review, registered in advance and run to standard reporting rules, searched five databases to October 2025. Eleven randomised trials with 568 adults covered exercise started after successful weight loss, during the maintenance phase when regain usually strikes. Bias was scored with the standard Cochrane tool.
People assigned to exercise regained 2.81 kilograms less than controls on average, a small edge with no statistical scatter between trials. Fat mass told a murkier story: the main analysis missed significance and the trials disagreed with each other, at 69 percent heterogeneity. The authors call the maintenance benefit real but modest. They ask for longer trials with standard exercise doses, honest adherence tracking, and uniform body-composition measures before stronger claims are made.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jiachen Wang, Yun Chen, Kai Xu, Jiansong Dai |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 29418 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |