For better health and a longer life span, exercise is more important than weight loss, especially if you’re overweight or obese, according to an interesting new review of the relationship between fitness, weight, heart health and longevity.
The study, which analyzed the results of hundreds of previous studies on weight loss and exercise in men and women, found that obese people were generally more likely to lower their risk of heart disease and premature death by gaining fitness than by losing weight or dieting.
The review adds to the growing evidence that most of us can be healthy at any weight if we are also active enough.
I’ve written frequently in this column about the science of exercise and weight loss, much of which, frankly, is frustrating if your goal is to slim down. This past research overwhelmingly shows that people who start exercising rarely lose weight, if any, unless they substantially cut back on food intake. Exercise generally burns very few calories to aid in weight loss.
We also compensate for part of the meager caloric outlay from exercise by eating more later or moving less, or inadvertently reducing the overall daily energy expenditure to dial back on our body’s metabolic operations.
Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix, is well aware of the inadequacies of workouts for fat loss. For decades, he has been studying the effects of physical activity on people’s body composition and metabolism, as well as their endurance, with a particular focus on obese people. Much of his previous research has underscored the futility of workouts for weight loss. In a 2015 experiment they observed, for example, 81 sedentary, overweight women began a new routine of walking three times a week for 30 minutes. After 12 weeks, some of them had lost body fat, but 55 of them had gained weight.
In other studies from Gaesser’s lab, however, overweight and obese people with significant health problems, including high blood pressure, a bad cholesterol profile or insulin resistance, a marker for type 2 diabetes, showed significant improvements in those conditions after they started exercising. whether they lost weight or not. Seeing these results, Gaesser began to wonder whether fitness might enable overweight people to enjoy sound metabolic health, no matter what their body mass, and potentially just as thin people. Live longer – or even longer, if skinny people got out of shape.
So, for the new study, which was published this month in iScience, he and his colleague Siddharth Angadi, a professor of education and kinesiology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, scoured research databases for previous studies related to dieting, exercise, fitness, metabolic health and longevity. They were particularly interested in meta-analyses, which collate and analyze data from several previous studies, allowing researchers to look at results for far more people than most individual studies of weight loss or exercise. , which are on a small scale.
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He wound up with over 200 relevant meta-analyses and individual studies. They then set out to see whether this research, which involved thousands of men and women, most of whom were obese, had found out about the relative benefits of being fit for losing weight or improving metabolism and longevity. In fact, they asked whether a heavier person had a greater health bang from losing weight or getting up and moving.
He found that the competition was not close. “In a head-to-head comparison, the amount of benefit from improving fitness was far greater than from losing weight,” Gaesser said.
Overall, the studies they cite suggest that sedentary, obese men and women who start exercising and improving their fitness reduce their risk of premature death by 30% or more. even if they do not lose weight. Gaesser said this improvement generally puts them at a lower risk of early death than those who are considered to be of normal weight but are out of shape.
On the other hand, if heavier people lose weight by dieting (not disease), their statistical risk of dying young is generally reduced by about 16%, but not in all studies. Some of the research cited in the new review found that weight loss in obese people did not reduce the risk of mortality at all.
The new review was not designed to determine how exercise or weight loss affects longevity in people with obesity. But in several studies he looked at, Gaesser said, people who lost pounds by dieting tried it again, a yo-yo approach to weight loss that often contributes to metabolic problems like diabetes and high cholesterol and shorter life expectancy.
On the other hand, exercise counteracts the same conditions, he said. It can also unexpectedly remake people’s fat stores. “Obesity people usually lose some visceral fat when they exercise,” he said, even if they don’t lose overall weight. Visceral fat, which is stored deep inside our bodies, raises the risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions.
Some studies they cite suggest that exercise similarly alters molecular signalling inside other fat cells that may improve insulin resistance, no matter how much weight someone lifts. “It seems that exercise makes fat more fit,” Gaesser said.
The primary conclusion of the new review, Gaesser concluded, is that you don’t need to lose weight to be healthy.
“You’d be better off, in terms of mortality risk, by increasing your physical activity and fitness, than by intentionally losing weight,” he said.
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