Yupp, I mean exercise. To me, the most important question is: How much and how hard should I work out to live a good life? That wasn’t always the key question for me. A couple of years ago, I got wrapped up in the San Francisco overachiever exercise madness. “What are you training for?” seemed to be the key question then. And you better not answer that with anything less than a 10K! 5Ks are for losers – and not the weight-loss kind of losers… At least that’s the message. It never quite jived with the anecdote from my mom’s experience: She was on medication for arrhythmia. Then she started walking almost every day for about half an hour. She’s off the medication now. She’s not walking all that fast. But she is consistent. Then the first research clue came in. Jennifer Michael Hecht in her wonderful “Happiness Myth” made a side comment that there is little research that supports the idea that harder work-outs are better than simple walking (she calls gyms “halls of mirrors”). Getting off the couch is where the exercise benefits lie but beyond that, we don’t know – or, worse, we know that it’s not that good for you because the risk of injury is increasing dramatically. Again, that matches another anecdote. I just about burned myself out those couple years ago! I was training for who knows what by being in the gym almost every day for at least an hour. On the weekends longer. I didn’t get enough sleep and worked my body too hard. I couldn’t possibly be overtraining, I told myself when I started feeling tired all the time, because I wasn’t an athlete. It probably was a combination of a not quite under control hypothyroidism and, well, overtraining. At least, after a few months of doing this and breaking up with my gym-rat boy friend, I was able to accept that. And now I feel vindicated that my low-dose walking is all I really need. Research presented in Time magazine supports the idea that more, harder exercise isn’t better than regular every day walking (big hat tip to Bella DePaulo).

John Cloud, the article’s author, began to ask himself, too: “Why am I doing this?” His answer, in part: To lose weight.

One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. [...]

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated. [...]

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Of course, exercise isn’t a total waste of your time. There are many other benefits to it, as Cloud outlines, just weight loss isn’t one of them at least not automatically, especially with high-intensity work-outs in “halls of mirrors.”

In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability. [...]

But there’s some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more [...]. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?

That is my question! Is it worth spending all that money – according to Cloud $19 billion per year – to go to the gym or can I just lace up my shoes and walk, like my mom?

Well, the research suggests that regular low-intensity exercise is just as beneficial as short bursts of intense exercise, like the gym-type stuff. As Cloud puts it

Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat.

So, if you’re sweating in the gym to lose weight, you might want to reconsider. It’s better for your wallet (no gym membership) and the environment (no driving to the gym to work out on machines that require electricity) to simply go out and walk – and we now know that the research, too, shows that it’s better for our waistline.

I have finally implemented my plan to follow my mother’s routine and walk half an hour every morning even if that means I have to get up at the dreaded hour of 6 AM. I used a week off to get started with that routine. So far, it has at least one of the hoped for benefits: I sleep better!

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