Why exercise WON’T help middle-aged to lose weight

HAVE you joined a gym, squeezed into Lycra and pounded a treadmill for hours in the hope of beating the middle-age spread?

Well, apparently you’ve been wasting your time and money.

A leading academic says the middle-aged should not exercise if they want to lose weight.

Professor Roy Taylor said it was ‘complete nonsense’ that overweight people were encouraged to exercise because they ended up overeating to compensate.

Instead, the metabolism expert from Newcastle University said, a low calorie diet was all that was needed to lose weight.

‘If people who are overweight start putting on Lycra and exercising, they will engage in compensatory overeating,’ he told the Diabetes UK Professional Conference in Manchester. It’s subconscious partly, conscious partly, but it’s a real phenomenon. So please – no exercise if you want to lose weight, for overweight, middleaged and above people.’

Professor Taylor told the conference his research had shown overweight people could lose 2st 5lb in two months on a carefully monitored diet of 600 calories a day.

But he stressed that exercise was vital for keeping weight off once it had been lost.

‘This doesn’t take away anything from the important message of exercise for keeping weight steady,’ the professor said.

‘Physical activity is really important in the weight maintenance phase. We know that a combination of increased physical activity and sustained calorie restriction is the best way to keep the weight down.’

Professor Taylor is carrying out a study to see whether encouraging diabetic patients to take up a low calorie diet will lead to a reversal of their type 2 diabetes. In an early stage clinical trial of 11 people, his team found that all the patients were able to reverse their diabetes by eating a diet of only 600 calories a day for two months.

Three months later, seven patients remained diabetes-free.

The results from his latest study, of more than 300 patients, are due to be published in December.

Commenting on Professor Taylor’s remarks to the conference, Professor Naveed Sattar of Glasgow University said: ‘If you are trying, as a patient, to lose weight, you are not going to lose it through exercise alone.

‘ It is not that exercise is not useful – it is vital to maintaining lower weight. But unless you are exercising at extreme levels you will not lose weight without also changing your diet.’

More than six in ten adults in Britain are either overweight or obese, according to the latest figures from the Government.

Being overweight increases the risk of serious and life-threatening conditions including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Previous research has found that taking up exercise even in the forties, fifties or even sixties can make a major difference.

A Danish study of 45,000 people aged between 50 and 65 last year reported that those who spent half an hour cycling a week had a 16 per cent reduced risk of a heart attack.

Separate research found that walking for just 20 minutes a day in your fifties or sixties could add up to seven years to your life.

And Swedish academics have found that even after a lifetime of inactivity, taking up exercise as late as your sixties can still make a marked improvement to your health.

Scientists think this is because even modest exercise has an antiageing effect on cells which could extend lifespan.

‘Compensatory overeating’