Middle-Aged Women: How to Avoid Weight Gain

How much exercise does it take for a middle-aged woman to avoid gaining weight?

Between hormonal imbalances from menopause and just getting older, women tend to pack on the pounds during menopause. This trend has doctors and researchers looking for the answer to the growing dilemma.

A new study by researchers at Harvard medical school focused on this particular question in middle aged women, trying to find out how much people need to exercise in order to stop weight gain.

The study followed over 34,079 healthy women with an average starting age of 54 as part of a Women's Health Study. Researchers began the study in 1992 and continued following them for 13 years.

The women ate a normal diet, and were given no instructions on reducing calorie intake.

Over the years, only 13 percent of the women stayed in the healthy weight range. The women who exercised over an hour a day were more likely to be in the healthy weight range group than those who exercised under an hour. The exercise times are based on moderate-intensity exercise such as walking.

If already overweight women wanted to avoid weight gain, they had to exercise even more

The average weight gain in the study was 5.7 pounds for all women.

Currently, the US government's recommendations are for adults to get 2.5 hours of exercise per week, but this study challenges those guidelines. This 150 minutes is well below the 420 minutes shown effective by this study.

According to Xinhua News Agency, I-Min Lee, the study's lead researcher and associate professor at Harvard medical school reported, "The result suggests that the current recommendations of two and a half hours per week are not enough to keep middle-aged women from gaining weight as they age."

The study authors also suggest that women make small lifestyle changes, such as walking more, parking at the back of the lot or taking the stairs to get in their hour a day of exercise. They also reported that high-intensity exercises such as jogging cut the requirement in half, so women would only have to run or do another high-intensity exercise half an hour a day.

Another option is for women to cut calories in place of the exercise. While this study focused solely on exercise habits, women who are unable or unwilling to spend that much time working out can eat less and get the same results.

Journal Star: Study: Middle-aged women need 1-hour workouts to avoid weight gainXinhua News Agency: Exercise an hour a day to keep weight away