Our focus here is diet, exercise and good health, but life is a continuum. What happens after you attain the promised land of normal weight?
Does anything have to change? Can you now relax and cool out?
Please don’t.
Once you have reached your normal weight, it is imperative that you continue to exercise and maintain your fitness level.
Don't be a stranger ...
A new study has found that fitness, not body weight, is a more important predictor of whether people with clogged blood vessels in their heart will die in the relatively near term, Reuters reported.
What may seem controversial is that “Being overweight, or even obese, but having a heart that could tolerate heavy exercise was markedly better than being a lean person who panted from walking up a hill,” the report said.
As we mentioned in our item on central obesity, belly fat, the study showed that obese patients who were not physically fit and those with large fat deposits around their hips and abdomen were much more likely to die during the 14-year study period than their fitter, more slender peers. “The combination of poor fitness and that kind of so-called ‘central obesity’ was even more dangerous, raising the risk for death roughly sevenfold,” the researchers said.
“The bottom line here is that fitness modulates the prognosis in patients with coronary artery disease according to their body weight,” study leader Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, a heart specialist at Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, MN., told Reuters Health. “To have a low fitness and to have central obesity seems to be a pretty bad combination.”
By all means, take justifiable pride in achieving your goal weight, but don’t forget the friends who brought you there, diet and exercise.
If it’s physical, it’s therapy.
Tony
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