Why, oh why, do I need to exercise?

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You’ll have to forgive my absence from the blog world this summer, I only now realized it has been 3 (three!!!) whole months since I published anything. But I am hoping that instead of sitting at your computer, you were able to keep busy outside and if you live in such a beautiful area as I do, I know you have gone on some wonderful adventures!

As you may have read in the previous posts, our clinic recently began a Medical Weight Loss program and it is going great! Various adventures this summer bring to mind the role of physical activity and weight loss. If you are looking for scientific information, American College of Sports Medicine published a position statement arguing that minimum 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity was needed to improve health but between 200 to 300 minutes for long-term weight loss. So, what exactly is moderate intensity physical activity? This would include brisk walking, light swimming or mowing. Yes, mowing can be a form of exercise too!

Some of my patients are elderly, meaning they are above the age of 65 (I actually can’t believe that people over the age of 65 are referred to as “elderly” in the medical world!). Should elderly exercise, too? Absolutely! Weight management by diet alone, exercise alone and both interventions were studied in regards to effects on frailty and body composition, bone mineral density, physical function and quality of life. It’s been determined that a combination of physical activity and improvement in diet enhanced physical function much better than either intervention alone. For instance, if people improved their diet alone, they still faced the risk of decreased lean body mass (that’s muscle, folks!) and decrease of bone mineral density at the hip (read: increased risk of hip fracture!)

Yikes, I can’t believe that you let me blab on about physical activity and research and so on for so long without giving you some real life information! So, to achieve 200 minutes per week of physical activity to sustain long-term weight loss, one needs about 30 minutes of activity 6 days out of a week. If you are ambitious and wanted to achieve the upper time limit of exercise described in the study above, you would spend 50 minutes 6 days out of a week. Sounds pretty overwhelming, doesn’t it? One realization that really helped me balance my work life with personal life and to be able to fit physical activity in there as well, was that exercise does not have to be done all at once. What I ended up doing, and what you may find helpful as well, is that I split my daily workout time into 3 “chunks”; I get up 15 minutes earlier and either run or walk on my treadmill, then I walk my dogs briskly for 15 minutes and when I get back home from work, guess what! I only have 15 minutes left of physical activity to do! It makes big goals so much more achievable. At night I typically do some kind of strength training, but… that’s a topic for another blog post, so be patient!

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