A structured diet and exercise program promotes favorable changes in weight loss, body composition, and weight maintenance.

Background: A number of diet and exercise programs purport to help promote and maintain weight loss. However, few studies have compared the efficacy of different methods.

Objective: To determine whether adherence to a meal-replacement-based diet program (MRP) with encouragement to increase physical activity is as effective as following a more structured meal-plan-based diet and supervised exercise program (SDE) in sedentary obese women.