Can Fish Oil Stall Weight Loss?
Fish oil supplementation has a lot of benefits. For example, people who supplement with fish oil are less likely to have depression and anxiety. Fish oil can also help to lower triglycerides. However, the question remains, can fish oil stall your weight loss?
Fish Oil is a Food
Fish oil is mostly fat. This isn’t necessarily a problem, in fact consuming fat is necessary for fat loss. For the most part, fish oil will contribute nicely to a fat loss regimen. Like any food, however, consumption of fish oil in excess could stall your ability to lose weight. In my opinion, you would really have to take a ton of it for this to happen.
I would recommend taking between one and three grams of fish oil per day if you’re going to take it. It definitely won’t stall your fat loss at those levels and will probably contribute to your ability to lose fat.
Additional Effects of Fish Oil
Fish oil can also really help you with your exercise regimen. As a natural anti-inflammatory, fish oil can help you to recover from intense exercise without taking medications like ibuprofen and naproxen sodium (medications that can actually slow the healing process even though they help muscles to feel better).
It has also been shown that a proper n3 to n6 ratio helps a lot in the prevention of cardiovascular disease. In English 
, you take fish oil to get the Omega-3 fatty acids (n3 fats). You want to basically increase Omega-3 intake while limiting Omega-6 intake.
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Do you think there is much difference between taking fish oil, krill oil or flaxseed oil as a source for omega-3s? I get confused with all the talk about which is better, but if there isn’t much difference, I would rather just buy the cheapest source.
Hi Sonia! I personally would take fish oil out of those three. Krill oil is going to be a lot more expensive with no additional benefits. You’re basically buying both fish oil and krill oil for DHA and EPA.
Krill oil marketers will tell you that krill oil has less contaminants but honestly that isn’t really true.
Flaxseed oil is going to give you a lot more Omega-6 than you want. You’re trying to improve your Omega3/Omega 6 ratio so you don’t want to supplement both.
One of the really interesting scientific findings about omega-3 supplementation is that there appears to be no additive effect in terms of fat loss for people who are already taking regular exercise.
But more recent research concluded that using fish oil supplements can increase training capacity, and that it is the ability of people to carry out higher training volumes before fatigue which helps with reducing body fat percent. (see Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology (2008) vol.52, pp.540-47.)
I do agree with you that there’s no real need to exceed 3 grams per day, particularly if using capsules with a high level of DHA/EPA rather than those packed with just ‘filler fats’.