If you’re like most of us, you’ve had issues with losing weight and keeping it off. Well, science has recently confirmed something my doctor told me years ago, and which worked for me when nothing else did. Eat what you want, but exercise regularly to maintain your perfect weight…
Exercise is the key to shedding pounds and keeping them off…
My own attempts at ‘dieting’ and reducing my caloric intake have generally been ineffective in the face of the abundance of food available in our overstuffed Western World. Recognising that, I turned to my family physician for help.
“Walk at for least 45 minutes every morning before breakfast,” he told me. “You’ll feel better for it, and the pounds will fall off. And you’ll find you want to eat less when you do sit down to breakfast.”
He was right. I lost 60 pounds / 27 kg in about 6 months. That’s the difference between a size 18 and a size 12! And it’s been an open secret in the medical community for years. I guess it was just considered too simple and common-sensical to get all scientific about it and, so, only now have researchers gotten around to quantifying the effects of exercise on weight loss and maintenance.
The recognition it deserves
Exercise has long taken a back seat to dietary interventions in the eternal quest to lose weight and keep it off. But now, researchers from the University of Colorado have demonstrated that vigorous exercise (including a brisk walk every morning) is more important to maintaining weight loss than restriction of Caloric intake. Successful weight loss maintainers eat as much as overweight or obese people, but they maintain what researchers call ‘energy balance’ using exercise to burn off what would otherwise be excess Calories.
“Our findings suggest that this group of successful weight-loss maintainers are consuming a similar number of calories per day to overweight and obese people, but appear to avoid weight regain by compensating for this with high levels of physical activity,” said study spokesperson Dr. Victoria Catenacci. Successful weight loss maintainers were defined, for purposes of the study, as people who lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year.
Researchers had study subjects wear step counters as a means of quantifying energy burn and had them record what they ate to put a number on their Caloric intake. It turned out that the successful weight maintainers clocked an average of 12,000 steps a day while folks who naturally maintained an ideal weight walked about 9,000 steps a day. Overweight and obese folks trailed the other two groups at about 6,500 steps a day.
My take
Like so many matters that science confirms with hard evidence, the relationship between weight loss/maintenance and exercise has been a matter of common knowledge and common sense. And like many of those matters, the understanding that exercise is more important than Caloric restriction in losing and maintaining weight loss had been largely overlooked clinically until this new study surfaced. No surprise the study report was chosen as Editor’s Choice in the latest issue of the journal Obesity.
~ Maggie J.