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Friday, February 21st, 2014

Average Obese Woman Gets Just 1 Hour of Exercise a Year

Author:     RANDY DOTINGA
Source:     HealthDay Reporter
Publication Date:     Feb 20, 2014 09:49 AM
Link: Average Obese Woman Gets Just 1 Hour of Exercise a Year
Stephan:   I flew back the other day from the Bay area and sat next to a woman who must have weighed close to 400 pounds. As you can imagine it was not a very comfortable flight and for most of it I found myself wondering how one becomes that fat. It doesn't happen overnight; it's a gradual process. I felt empathy for what her life must be like and, at the same time, confused about how one lets their life get that out of control. Clearly lack of exercise must be part of it. But I had no idea what a big issue this was until I read this story. The study referenced in this story appeared recently in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

A new study suggests that obese women get just one hour of vigorous exercise a year, while obese men don’t do much better at fewer than four hours.

The findings startled the researchers, whose main focus was finding better ways to measure how much exercise people get.

“They’re living their lives from one chair to another,” said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “We didn’t realize we were that sedentary. There are some people who are vigorously active, but it’s offset by the huge number of individuals who are inactive.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in three people in the United States is obese, a step above being overweight. Obesity boosts the risk of cardiovascular problems such as heart disease and stroke, diabetes and some cancers.

One expert did note that the definition of vigorous exercise was very limited in the study, and the researchers themselves acknowledged that the device used to track physical activity did not measure swimming or biking very well.

In the new study, researchers examined the results of a 2005-2006 government survey of adults aged 20 to 74. Among other things, […]

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