Can Women Take Creatine To Lose Weight?

Health food stores sell a number of products geared to weight loss, muscle gain and high performance. One of the most popular and studied is creatine monohydrate, taken by both men and women to enhance muscle strength. While creatine may help you lose weight by increasing your muscle mass, it will not work if you don't work as well.

Creatine Monohydrate Science

Creatine is manufactured in the body from foods and is an important component of muscle adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, your body's energy powerhouse. ATP is used rapidly during exercise and needs to be perpetually re-manufactured. Creatine monohydrate enhances the storage and availability of creatine phosphate so it is readily available to make more ATP during exercise. According to registered dietitian Douglas Kalman, MS, director at Miami Research Associates and consulting nutritionist for NIKE, creatine supplementation allows an individual to exercise harder and recover more quickly from high intensity exercise. Those adaptations may equate to increased caloric burn and accelerated weight loss.

Impact on Physical Performance

Creatine supplementation combined with training has been shown to increase strength and lean muscle mass and to improve the performance of high-intensity activities like weight training in men and women. But low-intensity, long-duration exercise may not be affected by creatine monohydrate. In a 1993 study of distance runners performed at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, creatine supplementation was shown to have no effect on improved performance of runners, and may have even led to inferior performance. If your exercise strategy for weight loss involves doing mostly cardio, taking creatine will not help.

Women and Creatine Supplementation

The structure and force potential of muscle fibers is identical for men and women. Therefore, the effects of creatine monohydrate on muscle tissue adaptation and ATP production are the same for men and women. However, one potential side effect of creatine supplementation reported by the University of Maryland Medical Center is weight gain, most likely due to water retention. If your goal is to lose weight, creatine may disappoint you by making the scale go up instead of down.

Creatine and Weight Loss

While creatine monohydrate is not a weight loss product per se, supplementing with creatine can enable you to increase your exercise workload, resulting in an increased caloric burn during your workouts. Creatine will also promote an increase in lean muscle mass, speeding up your basal metabolism so that you burn more calories all day long. But creatine is not a diet pill, and will not help you lose weight unless you are working out at high intensities.