Is it possible to lose weight by exercising?
Researchers attempted to answer the issue given in the title of this piece in a recent study. Let's establish some essential words before digging into the findings of this study and how they connect with what we already know about this topic.
What do we mean when we talk about fitness and fatness?
Fitness, also known as cardiovascular fitness or cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), is a measure of the body's ability to accomplish tasks involving the heart, lungs, and muscles. Muscle performance encompasses both strength and endurance measurements. Fitness affects mental alertness and emotional stability because of the links between the mind and body. The ideal measure of CRF is maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max), which is a laboratory measurement of the highest amount of oxygen a person can use during exercise. However, because it's easy to measure, self-reported physical activity is frequently employed as a proxy for VO2 max in research investigations.
As I mentioned in a previous blog article, fatness may be characterized in a variety of ways. The most often used metric is the body mass index (BMI), which is a measurement of your size based on your height and weight. Body fat percentage, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-height ratio, on the other hand, tell us considerably more about a person's health, metabolic risk, and risk of death than BMI. Despite this, BMI is the most often utilized measurement in research studies because of its accessibility and relatively low cost.
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What was the research study's purpose?
Researchers aimed to investigate the "fit yet fat" conundrum in a recent study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. According to several research, the fit but fat paradox argues that obese people who are also active have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those who are not. To investigate this conundrum, our researchers looked at the relationship between different BMI categories and levels of physical activity and the prevalence of three key CVD risk factors: hypertension (high blood pressure), high cholesterol, and diabetes. This was a big, observational, cross-sectional study that gathered data from 527,662 people at a single point in time with no follow-up period.
They classified persons as normal weight, overweight, or obese based on established BMI cutoffs. Inactive (no moderate or vigorous physical activity); insufficiently active (less than 150 minutes per week of moderate activity or less than 75 minutes per week of vigorous physical activity); and regularly active (at least 150 minutes per week of moderate or vigorous physical activity) (150 minutes or more per week of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes or more )
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What were the research study's findings?
In comparison to being inactive, the researchers found that being physically active regularly or insufficiently active was protective against hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes. For hypertension and diabetes, the protection was dose-related, meaning that higher levels of activity lowered risk to a greater extent.
Regular or insufficient physical exercise, on the other hand, did not compensate for the deleterious effects of being overweight or obese. In other words, people who were overweight or obese had a higher CVD risk than people who were normal weight, independent of their degree of physical activity.
Physical exercise lessens but does not eliminate the impact of overweight or obesity on CVD risk, according to these data.
What is the significance of this research for me?
Although the outcomes of this study may lead people to conclude that weight loss is the only way to improve health and longevity, we must not overlook the non-weight-related benefits of exercise, such as improvements in energy metabolism, oxidative stress, inflammation, tissue repair, and immunity.
Weight-loss treatments such as behavioral and lifestyle modifications, medications, bariatric surgery, or a combination of the aforementioned may be recommended by your doctor to help you achieve and maintain a healthy body weight. However, it's important to realize that obesity is a chronic illness over which an affected person frequently has no direct control.
Our degree of physical activity, on the other hand, is something we can manage. Whether it's running, walking, swimming, dancing, or lifting modest weights, we can always move more, and if it helps us enhance our health, all the better.
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