More Time Needs to Be Spent on Exercising to Lose Weight

By: Vickie Richter

With more and more developing nations adopting the Western lifestyle, they are also exposing themselves to the plight of that lifestyle—namely obesity. Obesity-related ailments including diabetes, stroke, gallbladder, and heart disease are responsible for over 300,000 deaths each year in the United States alone. The Surgeon General reports that about one-third or over 68 million Americans age 20 and older are overweight, while another 64 million are classed as obese.
Current data, showing that over one-third of American women are now considered obese, has given cause for a new study led by John Jakicic, chairman of the Department of Health and Physical Activity at the University of Pittsburgh. It appears that the American Heart Association's current guidelines of at least 30 minutes of moderately intense activity five days a week (150 minutes per week) falls short-by almost half-of what the new study recommends. After following 200 women considered being overweight or obese for a two-year period, Jakicic's team found that in order to take of weight and keep it off that the study group needed to exercise about 275 minutes a week, which translates to 55 minutes, five times a week or 40 minutes a day.
For the study, the women were divided into four groups, each with a different calorie intake restriction between 1,200 and 1,500 per day, and each group was assigned moderate to vigorous physical activity with varying levels of duration requiring a calorie burn of 1,000 to 2,000 per week. After six months, all of the women had lost weight; averaging between 8 and 10 percent of their starting weight-but only 47 women were able to sustain that weight loss at the two-year mark. These women exercised the most, burnt the most calories, and reported eating less food in general and decreasing dietary fat. The lead author of the study, John Jakicic, stated that people need to exercise more to keep losing weight, especially if they are already obese or overweight.
The study was supported by grant funds from the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and reported in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
It is hard for many people to find time for this kind of exercise with today's hectic life style, but there are ways to add more activity to your day that doesn't require much extra time. Try walking or biking to work, take the stairs, do leg lifts while sitting at your desk, wear wrist or leg weights during exercise or all day, be creative and make-up some of your own. Anything that keeps you moving helps to burn calories, and that is what it takes to get the weight off and keep it off.