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Not Exercising Worse For Your Health Than Smoking, Diabetes and Heart Disease, Study Reveals (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: We've all heard exercise helps you live longer. But a new study [published in the journal JAMA Network Open] goes one step further, finding that a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease. Researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients who underwent exercise treadmill testing at Cleveland Clinic between January 1, 1991 and December 31, 2014 to measure all-cause mortality relating to the benefits of exercise and fitness. Those with the lowest exercise rate accounted for 12% of the participants. Dr. Wael Jaber, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and senior author of the study, said the other big revelation from the research is that fitness leads to longer life, with no limit to the benefit of aerobic exercise. Researchers have always been concerned that "ultra" exercisers might be at a higher risk of death, but the study found that not to be the case. "There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk," he said. "We can see from the study that the ultra-fit still have lower mortality."
What was your exercise program like ?
Super simple.
I walk-jog about 30-45 minutes at least 3-4 days a week.
I do very light weight training with dumbells 3-4 days a week.
Nothing more. I also significantly reduced my calorie intake by cutting junkfood mostly.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Different details, but similar story here. 62, 5'11, lost 50 pounds through diet and every-other-day exercise (doing every day gets tough on the old bones are you age). I feel almost like being 30 again, which is probably somewhat the weight, and somewhat adding muscle. I'm trim and thin now, where I used to pack a beer gut and had borderline high BP. Now I watch the 25 year olds take the elevator to go up 5 floors while I take the steps two at a time.
You feel better in the end, but it takes a while to pay off, and it takes dedication to the effort. You can never say "OK, now I'm done". You have to keep at it on an ongoing basis. It's worth it though. I don't know how much more time you get, if any, but the time you have is much higher quality, if the average sedentary person my age is any indication.
I only went from 30 BMI to a 28 BMI, which doesn't sound like much and still puts me as obese
No, 30+ is obese. 25-30 is "merely" overweight.
I'd still recommend that you start moving more and get more fit and lean. Glad you're on the right track with food, but that's not the whole equation, as I'm sure you know.
This study does not prove what it purports to prove. Namely, that people who are currently sedentary will live longer and be healthier if they change their habits to get more exercise.
In order to show that, you would need to recruit sedentary people, then create an experimental group and a control group, and randomly assign participants to one group or the other. The control group would simply be monitored. The experimental group would receive an intervention that (ideally) caused them to exercise more. All participants would be tracked until death and then you could see whether the intervention was successful.
The flaw in the current study is the assumption that sedentary habits are the CAUSE of high mortality. But it may simply be that some underlying trait (such as diet or a metabolic disorder) is responsible for both the sedentary habit AND the higher mortality. In other words, maybe healthy people are more likely to go exercise in the first place, because they have more energy and feel good.
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