Weight Loss: Keeping it Off Takes a Lot of Exercise: An Hour a Day

Shoot the messenger, not Geezer. The L.A. Times reports on a recent study that found that overweight women need to exercise
about an hour a day, five days a week to sustain weight loss. The report, which in the July 28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine,
studied 201 women from 1999 to
2003. All the women were asked to consume 1,200 to 1,500 calories a
day, and they were assigned to one of four groups: one that burned
1,000 calories a week, one that burned 2,000 calories a week, one that
exercised moderately and one that exercised vigorously. Six months later, the Times reports, all four groups had lost an average of 8 percent to 10 percent
of their body weight. But it didn’t last. After two years, the average
weight of all participants was only 5 percent lower than their initial weight,
and there was no difference among the groups. But wait, this is the good part: About a quarter of the women who managed to sustain a 10 percent weight
loss exercised more, adhered to better eating habits and engaged more
often by phone with the intervention team. For them, exercise amounted
to an average of expending 1,835 calories a week, or 275 minutes per
week.
Read more in the L.A. Times.
Read an abstract from the study.