New Prescription Paradigm for Exercising
My newest study was published last week in Women’s Health Issues. We found that when mid-life women set exercise goals to lose weight or improve health, they spent significantly less time exercising than those with goals to improve well-being and to reduce stress.
The longitudinal study, released last week in Women’s Health Issues, sampled healthy women who were between 40 and 60 years old and worked full-time. We collected data on women living in the Midwest at three intervals, including one-month and one-year periods. The subjects answered questions about how much they exercised, what their exercise goals were, and how committed they were to achieving these goals.
Although regular physical activity helps prevent cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis, among many other illnesses, most mid-life women do not exercise enough. Understanding which types of exercise goals motivate women to exercise, and which ones don’t, can offer clues to developing better strategies to help women exercise more and prevent these devastating conditions.
We wanted our research to be practical for women and their physicians to easily understand and use. Our findings suggest that the typical way that most women approach exercising may be undermining their participation in it.
It is important to note that these findings challenge how society thinks about exercise. It’s counterintuitive. Instead of prescribing exercise to prevent disease, healthcare providers who emphasize physical activity as a means to enhance women’s quality of life might better facilitate long-term participation among healthy women, making disease prevention more likely.
Our research indicates that women are more committed and are more likely to plan exercise into their daily lives if they know that exercising will make them feel better immediately. Unfortunately, the standard approach to exercise taken in our culture has mainly taught Americans to consider exercise as a type of medicine to prevent disease and lose weight. It turns exercise into something we should do rather than something we want to do. This undermines and harms women’s motivation and participation.
The study also revealed another trend: women who exercised to lose weight reported exercising less than those who worked out to maintain their weight, regardless of how much they weighed.
Because research shows that exercise is effective for maintaining weight but less so for losing weight, we think that women who exercise to lose weight may not see results. Thus, they get discouraged and may quit working out.
So how can this research be used to help a woman exercise more? Healthy midlife women will embrace exercising if it nurtures them, not depletes them. Both my coaching with women and the research I’ve conducted show that women are more likely to be hooked on exercise and make it a priority if their reason for doing it is to enhance their day rather than prevent an illness that they may never get. Ironically, taking a life-enhancement approach to exercise results in midlife women improving their health and controlling their weight.
Bottom Line: With life enhancement as your goal, you are more likely to choose physical activities that you enjoy doing, making it much more likely that you will stay motivated and remain physically active.
Implications for successful weight loss: Physical activity should be a behavior you do to enhance your well-being rather than burn calories. Regular physical activity will contribute to your long-term successful weight control, but to do so you need to sustain it over time. Ironically, to achieve your weight loss goals, your reason for being physically active might need to be changed to improve your daily quality of life instead of burn calories.
If you have any questions about this study, or would like a PDF of this published study, just email me at michelle@essentialsteps.net or fitness@umich.edu and I’ll send it to you.
Warmly,
Michelle
Congrats on the pub!! Wonderfully imformative post, yet again. 🙂
These results, coupled with those described in your last post, make me wonder if low-intensity exercise might be more conducive to improving well-being–I mean, since it boosts energy, which would be interpreted by most people as a state of well-being. Then again, there’s a sense of euphoria that accompanies hard-core or risky exercise (e.g., mountain climbing), and I can imagine that being associated with well-being too.
I didn’t know that research shows exercise to contribute very little to weight loss, but it makes sense if you count calories. Sitting still, you might burn 90 calories an hour, and with brisk walking, you burn 350. One candy bar or 3-4 cookies completely obliterate the benefit, calorie-wise. What we eat affects our weight SO much more than how frequently we exercise. (Although I have read that activity during the day — standing, moving about, etc. — can definitely add up to weight loss.)
Anyway, I wonder if regular exercise contributes indirectly to weight loss via its effect on what we eat. I know that when I’m exercising regularly, I feel the effects of junk food more acutely. The dry mouth, headache, and bloating after a sugar rush seem like more of an assault on my body, so I’m drawn to fresh fruits and veggies. Plus, fresh plant foods have lots of water, and since exercise makes you thirsty, they become more appealing. Do you know if anyone’s done research on how exercise changes the foods people crave?
Winterwheat, those are great comments and questions! How exercising effects eating is different for everyone. For example, for some, exercise is an appetite suppressant. Runners often talk about this. But for others, they feel hungrier because they burned more calories than they are used to, and so they eat more to “rebalance” the energy equation. Clearly, this will not lead to any weight loss what so ever. What I suggest is that women learn to adopt physical activity as a non-weight-related behavior. Instead have it be a way they decrease their stress
,feel better, and know they are taking care of themselves in a really important way WITH NO FOCUS ON WEIGHT LOSS AT ALL. After this approach has become internalized THEN starting to learn how to make dietary changes that can be sustained. Going back to what you suggested. It may be that exercising will organically lead one to eat better and more healthier foods. If this happens of course it’s a bonus, but exercise is best sustained if it is not connected to losing weight.
Very nice information. Thanks for this.
I’ll share it on Twitter.
Needed to moment to give you acknowledgment, yes please continue with your postings, i very enjoy them. You always can write something absorbing that doesn’t bore me to death like what you find on many other bloggings.