Physically Fit and Overweight – No Problem

If you have a routine of regular exercise that you do week in and week out but you still are overweight I implore you not to get discouraged and to continue on. The physical benefits of routine exercise are general fitness, bodily health, and increased mortality, not necessarily lower body weight. We all are made differently and the normal body weight for some is simply higher than that of someone else. In fact new research has shown this to be the case in relation to premature death rates.

The study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that overweight people who are physically fit are 50 percent less likely to die prematurely than those who were thin yet not physically fit. The study looked at roughly 22,000 men between 30 and 83 and determined their fitness on a treadmill. Eight years later that men who died were more often than not the men who were thin or normal sized and unfit. The cutoff in this study for overweight used a BMI score of 28 to identify the overweight subject.

This study offers a good deal of hope to those who can’t seem to shed any more pounds despite being physically active and fit and it also should pose a good deal of caution to the thin folk of the world who think they’re just luck and don’t have to work out. Your chances of early death are greatly diminished by being in shape and are not just based on weight alone.

This study also brings up a point I made in an earlier post about BMI scores and Heart Attack risk. In that post I posed an opinion relating to the study which said that those with high BMI scores who were extremely fit probably skewed findings. I assumed that if you stripped these people out then findings associated with those who had high BMI scores would have been more pronounced. Well, this study probably provides some backing to my earlier thesis in that those with high BMIs who are also fit do not die younger than their thin peers. Click through to the BMI and heart attack post to get all of the details and let me know what you think in the comments.

Source
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, March 1999