Why Exercise Is Not The Key To Weight Maintenance
A recent study has concluded that exercise will not help in your quest of achieving and maintaining your goal weight. Achieving this is in fact far more reliant on your food intake. Not only that, the study also found that those who exercised lost less weight than those who didn’t participate in exercise. The research concluded that exercise will maintain heart health, but food is the key to a healthy weight.
Many studies have shown that regular exercise will positively contribute to a number of health complaints such as high blood pressure, diabetes and stress. However, a recent study has shown that maintaining a health body weight and the process of weight loss isn’t one of them.
The results of the study showed that those who participated in regular exercise were more likely to overeat as compensation of regular physical activity, they were also shown to be more sedentary during days in which they didn’t exercise.
The UK recommended guidelines for exercise are at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity such as cycling or walking per week/75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity such as running, plus strength exercises on two or more days per week such as yoga, heavy gardening or lifting weights.
However, the recent study showed that weight gain was greater among participants that met the exercise guidelines. Further results stated that the correlating factor towards weight gain was the participant’s starting weight. Those who were overweight were more likely to lose weight over the study period (2 years) than those who were a healthy weight at the beginning of the study.
We are bombarded with information and recommendations that exercise is the key to unlocking or weight loss potential. This information combined with the publications of fad diets and lack of portion control guidelines equated to inevitable weight gain, regardless of participation of exercise.
The importance of exercise cannot be understated, it helps to boost morale, mood and motivation, along with decreasing your risk for a wide range of physical ailments and diseases. However, it seems that choosing what to eat will have a far more beneficial impact on your weight than exercise.
