New study shows US and UK exercise guidelines won't stop weight gain for women

A new study which appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that older women who want to avoid gaining weight need to take at least an hour of moderate exercise every day.  (Examples of moderate exercise include brisk walking, leisurely cycling and golfing.) 

The findings are based on a study of 34,079 non-dieting, middle-aged women who were followed for about 13 years.  The women who gained little or no weight during the study started out at a healthy weight and consistently got the equivalent of an hour a day of moderate exercise.  Only 13% of the women fell into this category - the rest gained an average of almost 6 pounds during the course of the study.

The government-recommended guidelines for exercise in both the US and here in the UK are just 30 minutes, 5 days a week. 

These findings come as no surprise to me - it's pretty much what I've experienced in my own life.  When I took my first 'retirement' from my job as a curriculum manager at a further education college and started to work from home, I gained two dress sizes within the space of about 18 months, despite the fact that I continued to exercise every day.  I've lost that weight again now, but it took a while for the penny to drop and for me to realise that the level of exercise I had been used to taking was no longer enough now that I was home-based. 

With hindsight, when I went out to work, I used to be on my feet all day.  Dashing off to meetings, running around managing my teams, walking between the various teaching sites which were scattered throughout the town - I even chose a house which meant that I could walk to and from work each day, which added 25 minutes walking time to my day, and I would often walk to the shopping centre during my lunch hour or take a stroll around the nearby park with a colleague. 

When I retired from college life and started to work from my home office, much of this activity disappeared from my life and the extra weight started to pile on.  

Nowadays, I work out for an hour, at least 6 mornings a week and I know that I will always need to keep a close eye on what I eat. I also know that I could just resign myself to it and accept that, as we get older, we do get thicker around the middle (apparently, during our 40s and 50s, we start to lose 2 to 3% of our muscle mass per year), but, somehow, I just don't feel like me when I'm bigger.  It feels unnatural and I could never get used to what I see when I look in the mirror, so, for as long as is humanly possible, I will continue to get up at 6 am and work out.

You can read more about the new study here.

Comments

[Blueeyedbuffalo.wordpress.com]

When I heard about that study my reaction was "no way"! Healthy eating has been of interest to me since I was in college. I'm almost 60 and I have found that a 30 minute walk almost every day keeps me in shape. I also discovered rebounding which when I first started I lost pounds and inches and it only takes 15 minutes a day. But in addition to exercise we really have to cut back on foods that we used to be able to eat and not gain weight from because we were more active. I have cut out processed foods, fried foods, almost all sweets and rarely eat meat.

[Ann Harrison]

Thanks for commenting Blueeyedbuffalo! I know what you mean about rebounding - I've had a rebounder for years and I love them.