How much exercise does it take to NOT be fat?....

Today's Post: Thursday, 3-25-2010

A recent study that was reported by several online health news outfits found that women who exercised for an hour a day starting when they weren’t fat kept fat off and remained trim.

It also suggested that women who were overweight likely needed to do more exercise than that to lose the excess fat that made them overweight.

Is what this study suggests completely accurate? How much exercise does it take to NOT be fat?

That depends!

The bottom line is that you can lose fat weight and keep if off with less exercise than that.

If you do you have that much time to exercise, it DOES help. If you do exercise for about an hour a day and do it right, you can lose fat faster and more easily.

But many people, including individuals included in almost all the stories, have lost fat weight and kept if off with far less exercise time per day.

There are two reasons for that.

1. Most of the women in the study were likely ingesting a diet that was then typical of women in the United States that included lots of refined grain foods, packaged snacks, commercial and packaged baked goods and desserts, and also daily soft drinks. Most of them were probably watching an average amount of TV each week - over 20 hours a week.

2. And, most of them were walking for their exercise.

Women (and men) who eat very close to NONE of those things and never drink soft drinks, who watch 10 hours a week of TV or less, and who use interval cardio and strength training for exercise can lose fat and keep it off with far fewer weekly minutes of exercise.

True, if these women and men can also walk for an additional 30 to 40 minutes a day, they can lose fat faster, they can keep it off more easily, and their health will be slightly better.

(The ideal amount of exercise for good health is 3500 to 4200 calories a week. And, the ideal amount of calories a week for fat loss is 2800 or more calories a week. Doing both very vigorous exercise AND walking that much every day can safely get you to those numbers. But you can get excellent results with less.)

But, however nice that is for the people who have time for it and do it also, it’s NOT necessary to do the job.

If it was, only young people still in school and rich and retired people would be trim.

In fact, in case you missed it, we recently did a post that shows that interval cardio and strength training which can be done in as little as 8 to 15 minutes a day, has been shown to be quite effective in helping people be fit and healthy. And, those kinds of exercise also cause your body to burn extra calories for up to several HOURS after you stop doing them. They can often work BETTER for fat loss than an hour a day of walking.

(See, my post last month,
“New discovery suggests maybe you DO have time to exercise....”
Thursday, 2-25-2010)

You can even exercise 3 or 4 days a week and get results. But that’s IF you eat right and do the time efficient kinds of exercise.

I prefer exercising almost every day and even a second time on some days. That gives me three benefits.

Each session can be very brief and easy to fit into my day. I even have a Friday session of only 5 minutes.

If something prevents me from exercising one day a week, I still have most of my program going that week. (Losing a day if you only exercise three days a week cuts a full third of your exercise for the week by contrast.)

I get that extra calorie burn after my exercises seven days a week instead of three or four.

But if three longer sessions a week work for you and your results are good, by all means keep doing what works best for you.

Here’s two other tips.

Eat a DASH II or Mediterranean diet that’s higher than usual in nonstarchy vegetables, has very little whole grains and no refined grains at all -- and eat only health supporting proteins and oils.

Stop ingesting 95% to 100 % all of the other stuff you have been. (Some people can lose 60 pounds a year by just this step alone.)

Second, if you watch TV you can do one of two things.

You can list all of your TV shows that you watch and divide them into three equal groups, your top priority shows, those you like but not as much, and those you watch mostly out of habit but could do without.

Then, stop watching the third group completely and cut the second group at least in half. That will make time for exercise and for other things in your life you haven’t had time for.

Or, if you’ve already done that and still watch a lot of TV, get a stationary bike so you can get the equivalent of walking for almost all the time you watch TV.

So, there you have it.:

If you make it easy to get and stay trim and healthy using what you eat and how much TV you watch --or don’t watch to be more accurate, you need to do less exercise to do the job.

And, if you do the kinds of exercises that get results in 5 to 15 minutes, you can get by without walking for hours too.