The Guardian
London, UK
18 february, 2008


Exercise essential to keeping weight off after dieting, says nutritionist

Dieters who have managed to shed their excess weight need to do 90 minutes of exercise a day to keep the pounds off in the long term, according to a study. The finding comes as a leading nutritional researcher called on world leaders to tackle obesity with the same urgency as global efforts to tackle climate change.

Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston yesterday that exercising 60 to 90 minutes a day was essential to long term weight loss. By studying data on more than 5,000 men and women who have, on average, lost 70 pounds and kept the weight off for six years, she found that successful dieters had high levels of physical activity and consciously controlled their eating habits. This meant frequent weighing, following a consistent diet across the week and taking quick remedial action at the first sign of weight gain.

"There's no way around it," Wing said. "If you want to lose weight and keep it off you need to really change your lifestyle, particularly if you're overweight or have a family history of obesity. The obesity epidemic won't go away simply because people switch from whole to skimmed milk. They need to substantially cut their calories and boost their physical activity to get to a healthy weight - and keep minding the scale once they do."

In Britain more than one-fifth of adults are obese and, of the remainder, half of men and a third of women are overweight. Obesity is linked to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. By 2015, 2.3 billion adults are forecast to be overweight, including 700 million obese.

Philip James, of the International Obesity Taskforce, told the seminar urgent steps were needed to transform the environment that makes people fat. James, who chaired the UN Commission on the Nutritional Challenges of the 21st Century, said obesity was a problem for all of society, arguing that blaming individuals for their vulnerability to gain weight was no longer acceptable when the "environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic".

He added: "It is even more naive to tell people that they just need to make a little change in their eating habits or their daily activity and suddenly the obesity problem will be remarkably easily solved."

A big challenge for the food sector would be to transform its products to reduce the promotion and abundant array of high energy foods, he said.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2...research.health

Ninety minutes of exercise a day???!!! That's way more than I do, though I suppose it might depend how you define "exercise." I suppose if exercise is defined as anything besides sitting or lying down (standing, walking, doing dishes, etc), I do that much. But I formally "exercise" (cardio, weights) only 1/2 hour a day, most days, on average.

Telling people they'll have to go hungry and work out for over an hour every day is counterproductive, in my opinion. Sounds horrible.

Rachel

yup...that does sound horrible!!

There is no way that I'll ever exercise for 90 minutes a day.....I do walk a lot but I will never formally do that much exercise.

I was already skeptical as soon as I read that this is coming from a nutritionist.

Are you bleeping kidding me?!

If it's taking you 90 minutes to do a workout, that's about 60 minutes too long. That's not exercise, that's penance for eating carbola.

amen, Kristine... you want carbs you gotta work for them.

no thanks, I'll stay on my high fat heaven, thanks.

I must admit that I was when I read it too. Definitely agree with Kristine that it's more geared towards those maintaining (or trying to maintain ) with a high-carb woe.

Ninety minutes a DAY?? There is no way this is do-able for most people! I feel good if I get to the gym three times a week for a sixty-minute workout.

I hope Kristen is right, and these are the findings of scientists studying high-carb eaters!

My hubby is maintaining his 30+lbs weightloss on atkins last summer. He can eat 100g plus carbs a day but he tends to have odd days when he might do but he enjoys lowcarb so much he is happy with about 50g a day. All he does for exercise is ONE session fencing per week, sometimes he'll push the boat out and go to the gym or swim, but not that much I need to exercise a little more than him but jeez if i had to do it 90 mins a day i think i'd just give up AND i love exercise but that is just too much and too unrealistic.

I CAN however see myself having to do that if i'd carried on at Weight Watchers and i'd bet a tenner that the people in the study were indeed eating highcarb/low fat.

Did they specify what type of exercise they based their "90 minutes a day" thing on? I would suspect it's probably traditional endurance cardio, as opposed to weight training and/or interval/HIIT type cardio. Work smarter not harder!

I would even bet that they're talking "activity", and not necessarily "exercise" - maybe taking your dogs for a 45-minute stroll twice a day, doing 18 holes of golf on the weekend, playing on a soft ball team... that could add up to a 90 minute average per day, without really working intensely for 90 min.

There's another article related to this study on the "Research" forum - sorry, can't remember the name of the thread - and they are indeed referring to mild exercise like walking. It's kinda funny, because in that article, the researchers refer to 90 minutes a day as "a tremendous amount of exercise" or words to that effect. It does sound tremendous if you think of it as 90 minutes in the gym, but as Kristine says, 90 minutes spread over the day of walking or other light activity is pretty do-able.

Rachel

The only way I could maintain on a high-carb 10% fat diet was with 90 minutes of exercise and only 1350 calories per day. Is it any wonder that I could not commit to that forever?

On 30g carbs and ~75% fat and adequate protein, I can maintain on ~1950 cals and no exercise. But I exercise ~90 mins PER WEEK now. As pennink put it, the LC diet makes you look good in clothes, but you need exercise to make you look better without clothes. Firm muscles also make me feel in control of my life.

Does this mean that people with chronic health conditions that preclude exercise are doomed to obesity?

I'm losing weight on LC in spite of the fact that I can't exercise consistently. Some days I can't even handle "light activity' and get dizzy if I try to put away a whole load of laundry without taking breaks. Other days I can go for long walks and feel great.

I suspect the biggest problem there is defining people as "dieters". I'm not "on a diet"- I'm eating in a way that's healthy for me, and I'm losing weight in the process because I'm overweight, so eating healthy means my body is moving towards a healthy weight.

IMO, doing some sort of exercise during weight loss is good, but what you eat to lose weight, in other words the 'diet' you follow, is far more important.

However, while exercise per se may not be a particularly great tool for weight loss, it is for weight maintenance, and this is what the article is referring to.

According to the National Weight Control Registry, those who successfully maintain their weight loss, do so by including some sort of exercise in their regime:

I bet the NWCR is heavily weighted (pun intended) towards high-carb/food-pyramid dieters. I'd like to see what happens to the stats if all the LC-maintainers joined.