Once you hit the mid-forties, or so the conventional wisdom goes, unless you’re a PC (physical culture) Queen or King, progressive middle-aged spread is unavoidable. I even know of a highly publicized female M.D. who sends a lot of emails saying that women over forty can’t lose weight (unless they buy her $70+ program that gives you the startling advice to eat green things - but that’s another story). 

But no less an authority than USA Today (see link below) has reported on studies from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of North Carolina saying that walking helps keep those pounds at bay. The UNC report said that if people start walking at least four hours a week when they’re in their twenties (18 - 30), they were much less likely to have gained weight 15 years later.

In a controlled study from Pittsburgh, researchers found that if overweight middle-aged people would walk fast for 30 minutes to an hour a day, they lost seven pounds, on average, over the course of a year and a half, without doing anything about their diet except trying to “eat healthy.”  Those who didn’t exercise regularly gained an average of seven pounds, victims of middle-aged spread. That’s a fourteen pound shift from just taking a brisk walk every day. Could you imagine what would happen if they threw in a couple of push ups?

So let’s park our cars at the farthest end of the parking lot and spend half of our lunch hours wearing the soles off our shoes while enjoying the lovely fall weather first hand.  –Di

Middle-aged people can walk off extra weight (USA Today)

technorati tags:weight, loss, lose, weight, walking, middle-aged, spread, exercise, diet

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 8:11 am and is filed under Exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.