Timed Ingestion of 3x21g of Whey Protein + Exercise Sheds 14% Abdominal Fat in Overweight Subjects Within 4 Months

Minimal effort, minimal results - While you can lose weight by just adding whey protein to your diet, your success will more than double, when you're willing to work (out) for it four times a week!

It's not a secret that things that diet and exercise are the keys to weight control and health in the 21st century. If you skip only one of the two you can hardly expect optimal results. In that, it is often said that weight, or rather fat loss requires a significant reduction of one's total energy intake; and for athletes and already lean individuals, this may in fact be the case. For the average "free-living overweight or obese" individual, however, the dietary changes that are required can be as simple as adding three servings of 21g of whey protein to their regimen on a daily basis (the scientists found no overall increase in energy intake, this means the 252 extra kcal/day from whey were effectively compensated for by the overweight subjects of the study at hand.
Before you go ahead and buy a bag of whey from the next best Internet supplement vendor, though, I have to tell you that why alone may have some beneficial effects. Without regular exercise, however, you are not going to shed those ~10% abdominal fat, the subjects in the PRISE, i.e. protein, resistance exercise, interval sprint exercise, stretching/yoga/ Pilates, and endurance exercise, group saw over the course of the 16-week study period.

Table 1: Overview of the exercise program in the PRT and the PRISE group (Arciero. 2014)

ASs you can see in Table 1, the subjects trained four times a week. They did so at different rates of perceived effort (RPE) and they performed

• upper-body resistance exercise (UB) for the chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, and back,
• lower-body resistance exercise (LB) for the quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, and abdomen, 
• sprint interval training, and endurance training (type C) like walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, elliptical, rowing, rollerblading, cross-country skiing, etc. and
• supervised stretching, yoga and pilates workouts (in the PRISE group, only, where
  the four types of exercise were cycled on a weekly basis, such that participants performed each of the four exercises, 1 day/wk for a total of four exercise sessions/wk)

and one session (X), where they were free to chose whatever they wanted to do (i.e. resistance training, conditioning exercises, etc.).
During all sessions, the subjects use medicine balls, physioballs, rubber tubes, and bands, which were incorporated into a dynamic warm-up, footwork and agility drills, resistance and power movements, and core and body weight exercises (e.g., lunges, squats, and jumping rope).

Figure 1: Relative changes in body mass, fat mass (subcutanous, visceral and in the abdominal region) and waist circumference over the course of the 4 months study (Arciero. 2014).

If you think that's more than you can handle, you better take another look at the results in Figure 1. Are you really sure you don't have the guts (don't tell me you don't have the time, if you have time to watch TV and lie around lazily on your sofa) to work out on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday?
References:

• Arciero, Paul J., et al. "Timed-daily Ingestion of Whey Protein and Exercise Training Reduces Visceral Adipose Tissue Mass and Improves Insulin Resistance: The PRISE Study." Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md.: 1985) (2014).