Compared with weight loss, fitness can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease and premature death.

According to an interesting new study on the relationship between fitness, weight, heart health and longevity, exercise is more important to improve health and prolong life than weight loss. Especially when overweight or obese. The study observed the results of hundreds of studies on weight loss and exercise of men and women. The results showed that obese people who developed health without weight loss or weight loss had a lower risk of heart disease and premature death.

This study adds more and more data, indicating that if we also exercise, most of us can be healthy at any weight.

I have written many articles on exercise and weight loss science in this column. If your goal is to lose weight, many people will be disappointed. According to previous studies, people who start exercising rarely lose weight unless they also significantly reduce their food intake. Generally speaking, exercise has too few calories to help lose weight. We also tend to eat more, exercise less or unintentionally reduce the metabolic operation of the body after death, supplement part of the heat consumption caused by exercise, and minimize the daily energy consumption.

Glengate, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix, knows the drawbacks of fat burning therapy. He has studied the effects of physical activity on individual body composition, metabolism and endurance for decades, paying special attention to obese people. Many of his previous studies have proved the futility of weight loss programs. For example, in 2015, in an experiment directed by him, 81 inactive and overweight women started a new treatment that took three and a half walks a week. Several of them lost weight after 12 weeks, but 55 of them gained weight.

But in other studies in Dr. Gary’s lab, overweight and obese people have major health problems, such as hypertension, poor cholesterol status, or insulin resistance(a marker of type 2 diabetes). Whether they lose weight or not, the situation has improved greatly since they started exercising. After these findings, Dr. Gary began to question whether exercising overweight people can help maintain the metabolic health of slim people who have nothing to do with their weight. Thin people will be longer if they have a bad figure.

He and his colleague, Siddhartha Angadi, a professor of education and kinematics at the University of Virginia, began searching databases of previous research on nutrition, exercise, fitness, metabolic health and longevity. They are particularly interested in vowel analysis, which can collect and evaluate data from many previous studies, allowing researchers to examine the results of far more people than most individual weight loss or exercise studies(usually small-scale).

More than 200 relevant vowel analysis and individual studies have been found. Moreover, they began to explore all these studies, including tens of thousands of men and women, most of whom were obese. Ask him what he thinks about the relative benefits of losing weight or keeping fit for improving metabolism and longevity. In other words, scientists want to know whether weight loss or getting up exercise is better for overweight people.

They found that the competition was not fierce. “When compared face to face, the benefits of physical improvement were much greater than those of weight loss. Said Dr. Gad.

According to the research they referred to, even if there is no change in weight, sedentary obese men and women can reduce the risk of premature death by more than 30% by starting exercise and improving their physical fitness. According to Dr. Gadd, this improvement reduces the risk of premature death compared with people with normal weight but considered to be poor in stature.

On the other hand, if obese people lose weight rather than disease, the probability of death in young age will be reduced by about 16% on average. Although not all studies are like this. Some studies cited in the new analysis suggest that weight loss in obese adults does not affect mortality risk.