If you struggle with your weight, the fight just got a little tougher. The latest advice from researchers regarding women and their weight is that we need to exercise an hour a day, 7 days a week, to maintain our weight without dieting and to avoid the weight gain that comes with aging.
An hour. As in, 60 minutes.
Have you seen a woman lately with an extra hour in her day?
Me either.
Nonetheless, that’s the recommendation released online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"We wanted to see in regular folks -- people not on any particular diet -- what level of physical activity do you need to prevent weight gain over time," said the lead author of the study, Dr. I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University. "It's a large amount of activity. If you're not willing to do a high amount of activity, you need to curtail your calories a lot," Lee told the Los Angeles Times. More from the story:
“The study was based on surveys of more than 34,000 U.S. women who were, on average, age 54 at the start of it. They reported their physical activity and weight, as well as health factors such as smoking and menopausal status, over 13 years. On average, the women gained 5.7 pounds during the study.
“Only those women who were normal weight at the start of the study and engaged in moderate-intensity activity an average of 60 minutes per day, seven days a week, maintained a normal body weight, defined as a body mass index of less than 25. That amount of exercise is three times higher than the amount recommended by the federal government -- 150 minutes per week -- to lower the risk of chronic ailments such as heart disease.
"You can still do much for your health with a lower level of exercise," Lee said. "But if you want to exercise for weight control, it's 60 minutes a day."
Finding that 60 minutes may well be harder than doing the exercise itself for today’s women, who often are balancing jobs, marriages, children and even their aging parents.
"Time is a four-letter word," Eva Lazarra, 48, a pharmacist at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois, told Reuters News Service. Lazarra was taking a break from work to lift weights at the facility's fitness center.
"In a realistic world of a working mom with a family, it can be difficult. I've done my best," said Lazarra. "I have done marathons. I have done triathlons. Unfortunately, we have to start looking at prevention, and that being part of our daily life."
Dr. Mary Tillema, 42, a neonatologist at the medical center, told Reuters that an hour a day of moderate exercise will be tough. "I think that's a lot to ask of the typical person. If I don't watch what I eat, I gain, even though I try to consistently exercise."
Tillema works out three to four days a week, with a routine that includes 35 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and about a half hour of weight training.
"I'd like to think that I can get away with less,” Tillema said, “but I can't because I see the weight start to creep up and I don't feel as good. But I certainly don't get an hour a day," she said.
USA Today points out that an hour of exercise a day doesn’t have to be in the gym, or even in an organized program. Just brisk walking will do the job, as long as you put in the time. Lee said that walking was the most common activity of the women in the study. If you do more vigorous activity, such as running, 30 minutes is equal to 60 minutes of walking. And that 60 minutes can be accumulated throughout the day in “short bursts of at least 10 minutes each.”
TELL US
Is this possible for you? Is there a place in your busy life to carve out 60 minutes a day of physical activity? Or does this discourage you and make you feel you’ll never get control of your weight?
The Los Angeles Times story:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/24/science/la-sci-women-weight-gain24-2010mar24
The Reuters story:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62M5QP20100324
The USA Today story:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2010-03-24-preventweightgain24_ST_N.htm