If you made weight loss a New Year’s resolution (yet again), one way to be successful in the long run is to simply sit less and move more throughout the day, with or without a traditional exercise program. That’s the encouraging takeaway message of an 18-month study from Wake Forest University, published in the journal Obesity in December. It included 183 inactive obese adults in North Carolina, ages 65 to 85 (average age 70), who were assigned to one of three groups for six months and then followed for an additional year:
- One group engaged in structured exercise (treadmill walking or other aerobic exercise at moderate intensity), four to five days a week, for a target of 200 minutes a week (Exercise group).
- Another group increased daily steps (up to 10,000 a day) by making it a point to “move more, more often” in their daily activities (SitLess group).
- A third group did structured exercise and also incorporated SitLess movements throughout the day (SitLess + Exercise group).
Participants in the SitLess and SitLess + Exercise groups were encouraged to integrate enjoyable physical activities into their day and not go long periods without moving in order to accumulate the equivalent of at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity or higher movement, plus plenty of light activity, a day. All three groups followed a reduced-calorie diet and attended a weight-loss program that also involved behavior change counseling. And all participants wore a monitor that tracked their activity levels. The study participants were mostly women and highly educated; many participants had hypertension and arthritis. After six months, participants were encouraged to continue their physical activity for the next year.
Over six months, all three groups lost about 18 pounds on average (not bad!), with no significant advantage seen for the Exercise or SitLess + Exercise groups compared to the SitLess-alone group, as the researchers expected. But what happened over the following 12-month “maintenance” period was even more interesting. After people lose weight, they often gain much of it back—but the participants in the SitLess groups regained much less weight than those in the structured exercise group (5-6 pounds versus 10-11 pounds).
As the paper points out, regular physical activity is important for maintaining weight loss, but structured exercise can backfire because people who make it a point to exercise may compensate by being even more sedentary the rest of the day—they may sit more and decrease their overall daily non-exercise movements and end up burning even fewer calories than had they not intentionally exercised.
“Based on our findings alongside a body of evidence from the last two decades, we hope more people will seek out enjoyable activities that can be built into the day and find new options as the weather changes or those activities become stale,” said Jason Fanning, Ph.D., the lead researcher. Some of the activities encouraged in the study were simple things like standing and doing light movements while watching television, walking the dog, gardening, and taking the stairs instead of the elevator, but, as Dr. Fanning also noted, some of the bodily movement needs to be at a moderate or vigorous intensity too.
BOTTOM LINE: The study findings suggest that engaging in “daylong movement” can be better sustained over the long term than following a structured exercise program and so may be an easier, more accessible way to lose and keep off weight. This approach may be especially appealing for people who “hate to exercise” and for those who are older or obese or have arthritis or other conditions that make them hesitant to exercise. Moreover, engaging in more frequent bouts of activity throughout the day may have additional cardiometabolic benefits—for example, it may help control blood sugar better than longer, single sessions of exercise do.
