Dietary and Exercise Interventions to Target Obesity and Chronic Diseases
A special issue of Nutrients (ISSN 2072-6643). This special issue belongs to the section "Nutrition and Obesity".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 5 December 2025 | Viewed by 3689
Special Issue Editor
Interests: obesity treatment; exercise physiology; energy balance; clinical trials; chronic diseases
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Obesity, an ever-growing problem in nearly all developed countries, is a major risk factor for most chronic diseases. While newer anti-obesity medications hold promise for enhancing weight loss and improving certain chronic conditions over lifestyle approaches alone, these medications are not accessible for many individuals due to issues with access, cost, insurance coverage, side effects and patient preferences. Thus, there remains a critical need to develop more effective lifestyle-related obesity treatment strategies.
Current recommendations for patients with obesity or who are developing a chronic disease call for lifestyle weight loss approaches involving the prescription of a reduced energy diet along with advice to increase physical activity. However, adherence to energy-restricted diets declines markedly within 1-4 months. Increasing physical activity/adhering to an exercise program also has its challenges, whereas well-designed, long-term (≥6 month) studies have consistently shown that weight loss induced by exercise only accounts for 30-40% of the weight loss expected based on the measured energy expenditure of the exercise sessions. There are also many barriers to increasing engagement in exercise (e.g. access to exercise facilities, time constraints, motivation), which decrease exercise adherence.
Several approaches have previously been proposed to improve the effectiveness of nutrition and physical activity/exercise interventions for obesity and chronic disease treatment. Such approaches include focusing on a specific diet (e.g. ketogenic diet, the Mediterranean diet), time-restricted feeding/alternate-day fasting, combining nutritional interventions with exercise interventions, or developing novel ways to increase adherence to a particular dietary prescription. Exercise interventions such as high-intensity interval training and resistance training, which do not follow the common moderate-intensity aerobic exercise prescription, have also shown promise for obesity and chronic disease treatment.
Papers addressing these topics are requested for this Special Issue, especially those exploring the interaction between diet and exercise for obesity and chronic disease treatment/prevention.
Dr. Kyle D. Flack
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- obesity
- chronic diseases
- diabetes
- cardiovascular disease
- cancer
- weight loss
- exercise
- intervention
- dietary approaches
- energy balance
- adherence
- effectiveness
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