No more diet blues for weight-watchers

FOR a group of sedentary, overweight people, three hours of moderate exercise a week was enough to halt their weight increase and even to be...

FOR a group of sedentary, overweight people, three hours of moderate exercise a week was enough to halt their weight increase and even to begin to reverse it, without any change in diet, a new study has found.

The relationship between weight and exercise levels has been debated in recent years, and different groups have issued conflicting guidelines about how long and vigorous workouts need to be.

For the new study, published recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers from Duke University randomly assigned 120 middle-aged men and women to a no-exercise group or to workout regimens that were the equivalent of briskly walking 12 miles a week, jogging 12 miles a week or jogging 20 miles a week.

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The walkers, whose exercise took about three hours each week, lost an average of about two pounds over the eight months of the trial, while those doing the toughest workouts lost on average more than six pounds. All three groups saw a marked improvement in their ratio of body fat to muscle.

Members of the sedentary group gained an average of two pounds.

One researcher, Cris Slentz, said there appeared to be no sharp distinction between moderate and vigorous exercise.

Rather, he said, a direct link exists between the number of calories burned and the amount of weight lost. ‘‘The more one exercises, the more one benefits,’’ he said.

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The findings suggest that people gain weight because they are consuming slightly more calories than they burn, Slentz said, noting that an imbalance of one teaspoon of sugar a day can translate into two added pounds a year. But, he added, a modest amount of exercise can reverse this.

The New York Times News Service