In this blog series, we hear from some of the top health professionals in the UK about the importance of physical activity for lifelong health as we get ready to celebrate National Fitness Day on Wednesday 18 September.
In the third blog of the series, we hear from Dr Xand Van Tulleken, British doctor and TV presenter on Morning Live, who discusses the scientific break down of exercise and why getting active can help reduce the risk of multiple long-term health conditions.
Why is exercise good for us? We are very confident that exercise, even in small amounts, can prevent or improve almost every heath condition. After just one session of whatever kind of exercise you choose, you can measure improvements in muscle strength, immune-system efficiency and insulin sensitivity (a useful indicator of your risk of type 2 diabetes). It doesn’t have to be hard work: even low intensity exercise like singing or walking have been well studied and seem to significantly reduce your risk of death. There are distinct benefits to weight-lifting, high intensity exercise and activity but even if you just pick one you’ll be doing yourself huge amounts of good. There are no drugs or medical treatments that can come close to having these effects.
But even as we have grown more confident about the benefits, the reasons why exercise is so important for our health have remained mysterious. It has always seemed to me that, if anything, it should be bad for us. If you decide to start driving your car further and faster each week, it will wear out quicker and break down sooner. Why do our bodies respond in a completely different way.
The answer seems to lie, at least partially, in the one thing that exercise doesn’t help with much: losing weight. Everyone knows that when you got for a walk you burn more calories than when you’re sitting down. And yet, strangely, lots of research shows that exercise isn’t a very effective method of losing weight.
This is because the calories you burn are taken from unexpected places. When you burn 500 calories going for a walk most of them aren’t taken from your midriff. Instead, they are taken away from other systems in our bodies. Exercise steals calories away from our stress responses and from inflammatory processes that are linked to everything from cardiovascular diseases, dementia and cancer.
Even in people who do huge amounts of exercise – long distance runners and hunter gatherers – they don’t burn many more calories in total than those of us with desk jobs, they just burn them doing different things. This sounds extraordinary but it has been documented very well (if you’re curious to know more it is called the Constrained Energy Expenditure Model!). Those active populations are healthier because they have lower levels of stress, inflammation and reproductive hormones. All of which are great for our long-term health.
I think about this every time I burn calories exercising. I’m not getting thinner, but exercise never worked to get thinner and at least now I know why. Mainly I think of how, in a way, I’m burning off my risk of illness.
To find out more about National Fitness Day and how you can get involved this year, visit the website here.
More People More Active More Often
