¶ … aerobic exercise or resistance training to a very low calorie diet are Donnelly JE, Jacobsen DJ, Jakici JM, and Whatley JE, "Very low calorie diet with concurrent vs. delayed and sequential exercise" published in 1994 in the 18th volume at page 469 of the International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolism Disorders (Donnelly et al.) and Bryner RW, Ullrich IH, Sauers J, Donley D, Hornsby G, Kolar M, and Yeater, R, "Effects of Resistance vs. Aerobic Training Combined With an 800 Calorie Liquid Diet on Lean Body Mass and Resting Metabolic Rate" published in 1999 in the 18th volume at page 115 the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (Bryner et al.). Both publications examined the hypothesis of whether the addition of either aerobic exercise or weight training to a very restricted diet increased various desirable measurements such as weight loss, fat free or lean mass body weight, and resting metabolism of the subjects. The Donnelly et al. study found that neither the aerobic exercise nor the weight training had a significant effect on weight loss or the ratio between weight loss and fat free mass. Only the resting metabolism rate of the group that did both aerobic exercise during the diet and weight training subsequently had a very small (6.1%), but significant, increase in baseline. The rest of the groups showed no significance difference in total weight loss or resting metabolism rate. Thus, the conclusion of the paper was that the addition of aerobic exercise or weight training did not...

study determined that the addition of aerobic exercise or weight training had significant but differing effects. The addition of aerobic exercise significantly increased the weight loss of the participants on the diet (4.7%) compared to the group doing resistance training and controls. However, almost the entire difference can be attributed to loss of lean body mass (4.0%). The addition of resistance training avoided any loss of lean body weight, but did result in less overall weight loss. Further, those using resistance training had a significant increase in resting metabolic rate (19.2%). Based on these results, Bryner et al. concluded that the addition of resistance training to those on a very low calorie diet would have two desirable effects: (1) help preserve lean body mass and (2) increase resting metabolism rate.
The scientific method was used in the two papers in very similar manners. Both groups observed the amount of weight loss for people on very low calorie diets and wondered if it could be increased by the addition of aerobic exercise or weight training. Both appear to have begun with the hypothesis that these added activities would have positive effects on particular measurements such as total weight loss and resting metabolic rate. Lean body mass was measured in both studies to better interpret the total weight loss results. Both studies had at least…