For many people, fitness and weight loss might mean the same thing.
This is especially true during the season of New Year’s resolutions amid a pandemic that led to an estimated 39 percent of patients in one study to gain weight.
However, recent studies and wisdom from medical experts indicate that exercise offers significant benefits whether or not it is taking off pounds. In fact, one recent study published in iScience shows how exercise can impact every cell in the body to improve blood pressure, glycemic control, blood lipids, vascular function and more.
“The major take-home message is that just being physically active and trying to improve your fitness seems to provide better prospects for longevity than just trying to lose weight,” said Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University in Phoenix and one of the study authors, according to NBC News.
Another study published in the fall by JAMA showed that more daily steps were correlated with lower rates of all-cause mortality among both Black and white middle-aged men and women.
According to the iScience study, “a weight-neutral approach to treating obesity-related health conditions may be as, or more, effective than a weight-loss-centered approach.”
This conclusion was based on the connection between increasing weight loss attempts in the U.S. compared with increased prevalence of obesity, indicating that a weight-loss centric approach is ineffective at improving health.
When people attempt to lose weight through exercise and fail to see results, they often give up. According to a 2019 article in Scientific American, research suggests that roughly 80 percent of people who lost a significant portion of their body fat were not expected to maintain it for 12 months.
With failed weight loss attempts, people are caught in what the iScience study calls “weight cycling,” which is associated with significant health risks, as well as weight gain.
Nina McCollum a 52-year-old Cleveland mother, began gaining weight after she had a baby at age 40, according to NBC News. Recently, she has found that exercise doesn’t keep the extra pounds off.
However, she’s as much of an exercise enthusiast as ever.
“I don’t care anymore that I’m not like a stick figure,” McCollum said. She’s focused instead on staying strong and flexible as she ages and preventing heart disease, which runs in her family.
Apart from having benefits for improving brain health, reducing disease risks, strengthening bones and muscles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, exercise can also impact “unhealthy fat” and all over body fat.
“Although exercise training typically does not lead to significant reductions in body weight or total body fat, exercise training can significantly reduce visceral and ectopic fat,” said the iScience study.
Visceral fat is located deep within the abdominal cavity between internal organs. It has been linked to metabolic disturbances as well as increased risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. In women, it's associated with breast cancer and gallbladder issues. Ectopic fat accumulates in areas where fat tissue isn’t normally found, such as the liver, heart, pancreas and muscles.
Even if it doesn’t seem like exercise is leading to weight loss or even reducing the amount of body fat a person has, researchers found that it does positively impact certain fat tissues and improve insulin sensitivity.
Overall, physical activity is associated with a 15 to 50 percent reduction in all-cause mortality and a 15 to 40 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease mortality. Increasing levels of cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with a 30 to 60 percent reduction in all-cause mortality risk, according to the iScience study.
“If you can get patients who are overweight to be active, they get the same health benefits,” as people who are not considered overweight, said Dr. Robert Sallis, a clinical professor of family medicine at the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine who inspired the “Exercise is Medicine” campaign. “In fact, if you’re at a normal weight and you aren’t physically active, you’re putting yourself at risk for a lot of conditions,” he said.
In order to get “substantial health benefits from working out, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services recommends adults to do at least 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes a week of vigorous physical activity.
Related
Related
