Exercise Is Key to Weight Reduction Over Long Haul

Maybe you've heard the workout mantra or even uttered it yourself: I exercise, therefore I can eat whatever I want without gaining a pound.

Dream on.

Regular exercise can give you more leeway at mealtime. But even those rigidly faithful to their workouts don't enjoy caloric carte blanche. Researchers zeroing in on the relationship between exercise, weight loss and weight maintenance have discovered a number of practical findings.

Keep Moving

Exercise plays a role in weight loss and weight maintenance, but it seems to be especially critical for long-term maintenance. If you want to keep off the pounds you just shed--or to avoid extra pounds as you age--keep moving.

Exercise, in fact, might be the most important strategy for keeping off weight, according to recent research by John Foreyt of the Nutrition Research Clinic at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.

He compared different treatment approaches in 130 obese subjects. A diet-only group was put on the American Heart Assn. diet; a combination group was put on an exercise program (brisk walking, eventually five days a week) and the same prudent diet; an exercise-only group was put on the same brisk walking program and told to eat prudently, but was not given specific instructions on calorie restriction.

At the end of the first year, the diet-only and combination groups lost more weight than the exercise-only group. But at two-year follow-up, the diet-only and combination groups had regained weight.

"The exercise-only group not only had maintained, but had lost more weight," Foreyt says. "Exercise alone may be more effective and beneficial in long-term weight control than restriction of dietary intake alone or in combination with exercise," concludes Foreyt, who presented his findings in December at the National Institutes of Health Conference on Physical Activity and Obesity. He suspects his findings apply to normal-weight people as well.

That doesn't mean that you can eat whatever you want if you work out. But it points to the value of emphasizing other lifestyle changes besides diet.

Another study, published last year in Topics in Clinical Nutrition, also supports the value of exercise for weight maintenance. Nearly 70% of 99 middle-aged, normal-weight women said they exercised regularly, half of them five to seven days a week. More than half said they never had to diet, relying instead on physical activity and avoidance of certain foods and beverages.