As
a new year begins, people flock to diets like lemmings to cliff
edges. The bad news: Some 95% of those diets will fail in the long
run, and many of us will wind up heavier and less healthy than when
we started.
But
there’s good news, too: Fitness may be even more important to your
health than weight is. And fitness is something you can improve
regardless of the number on the scale.
The
latest in a series of studies by researchers at the Cooper
Institute in Dallas, as well as a meta-analysis of
other studies, have found that people with higher levels of
cardio respiratory fitness (a measure of how much oxygen your body
uses during exercise) have less chance of early death than those with
lower levels, even if they are considered overweight or obese. And
it’s way better, healthwise, to be fat and fit than to be thin
and unfit. “If you’re fit, it nullifies the apparent risk of high
waist circumference or obesity,” says Paul McAuley, a professor of
exercise science at the University of South Carolina. “Fitness is a
powerful indicator of physical health.”
If
this is true, why aren’t we hearing about it? One reason is that
researchers, like the rest of us, are still entrenched in the “fat
will kill you” mindset, and interpret their findings accordingly.
For instance, pretty much all the research on weight loss involves
some kind of change in lifestyle, often in the form of exercise.
But
researchers tend to attribute better health or lower mortality only
to the weight lost, especially if those in the study drop from the
“obese” or “overweight” categories into the “normal” one.
They fail to explore the idea that it might be the exercise (and the
better fitness that results) that makes the difference, rather than
the weight itself.
Another
reason is that many of the studies on weight and health don’t even
ask participants about their fitness levels, let alone measure them.
“Every week, in leading scientific medical journals around the
world, I can see a finding on obesity and health condition X or Y,”
grumbles Steven Blair, a professor of exercise science and
epidemiology at the University of South Carolina. “I type in
‘physical activity’ and get ‘term not found.’ That is junk
science. You cannot study health and weight without taking physical
activity into account.”
Some
experts believe that fitness accounts for some of the more puzzling
findings on weight and health, like the so-called obesity
paradox: that, among sufferers of chronic diseases like type 2
diabetes and heart disease, fatter people fare better and live longer
than thinner ones.
“Fitness seems to mitigate the relationship
between fatness and [disease] prognosis,” says Carl Lavie, M.D.,
medical director of the Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New
Orleans. “It looks like it’s more important to maintain your
fitness than your leanness.”
We
still don’t fully understand exactly how fitness, weight, and
health interact. But it’s clear that fitness is a crucial aspect of
good health. So this year, resist the temptation to put yourself on a
futile and potentially damaging diet, and find ways to get a little
more active instead.
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