Eating a healthy diet and exercising take hard work. It’s much easier not to exercise and eat whatever you want than it is to watch everything you put into your mouth and then sweat it out at the gym. However, if you want to stay health and you want to lose weight or maintain weight loss, you have no choice, or do you?
Research Says Exercise May Not Be Effective in Maintaining Weight Loss
In a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, women who exercised regularly gained less weight over the course of several years. However, this was only true of women who were not overweight. In the study, they considered a woman obese if she had BMI of over 25.
What’s more interesting, the individuals who were not overweight had to exercise a lot to maintain their weight – at least an hour a day of moderate intensity.
What This Means and What You Can Do
Therefore, you have to exercise at least an hour each day with moderate intensity AND lose enough weight to be considered within normal BMI range to maximize the benefits of exercise. If not, you may be working towards a losing battle. Not only for overweight individuals, but also for normal BMI people who don’t work out that much.
So should you just throw your hands up in the air and say, “FORGET IT – I GIVE UP!”? No, absolutely not! What this is saying is that while it may difficult to lose or maintain weight when you don’t exercise an hour each day, it’s not impossible. Any amount of exercise you do is burning calories you otherwise wouldn’t if you just sat on the couch and ate more food. Besides that, exercising just the government’s recommendation of 150 minutes a week is enough to cut down your risk of illness and disease (such as heart disease).
Focus on the overall goal of healthy eating and exercising – being healthy! You may not see the scale go down but you can know that deep down inside you are doing your body good by taking care of yourself the best way that you can!
Sun, Apr 4, 2010
Health, Weight Loss