Chubby Knows How to Exercise

Exercise and Obesity: An Overview

Experts agree that regular exercise is one of the most effective ways to prevent obesity. It is also important for people who are overweight or obese to incorporate exercise into their daily activity.

Would you like to be more physically active, but are not sure if, or how, to do it? The purpose of this article is to help you become more active, regardless of your size.

The Benefits of Exercise

The best way to take off pounds is to do so gradually by getting regular physical activity and eating a balanced diet that is lower in calories and saturated fat.

Besides helping to take off pounds, physical activity has several other benefits, such as:

• Reducing your risk of dying from heart disease or stroke
• Lowering your risk of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, colon cancer, and diabetes
• Lowering high blood pressure
• Protecting against falling and bone fractures in older adults
• Helping to protect against certain types of cancer, such as breast cancer.

Regular physical activity can also make you feel better because it:

• Helps keep your bones, muscles, and joints healthy
• Reduces anxiety and depression and boosts your mood
• Helps you handle stress
• Helps control your weight
• Helps control joint swelling and pain from arthritis
• Helps you feel more energetic
• Helps you sleep better
• Improves your self-esteem.

An active lifestyle can help anyone. In fact, 30 minutes of moderate physical activity on most days of the week can significantly improve your health. Most people can get better health benefits if they engage in physical activity that is more vigorous in intensity and/or longer in duration.

To help manage body weight and prevent gradual, unhealthy weight gain, you should get about 60 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity activity on most days of the week while not exceeding your recommended daily intake of calories. In order to keep the weight loss off, get at least 60 to 90 minutes of daily, moderate-intensity physical activity while not exceeding caloric intake requirements.

Massage for Chubby

by Theresa Brennan

There are physiological considerations when working with an obese person. Large people are often in constant, chronic pain; their joints ache, their muscles are fatigued. They are used to ignoring their body and its pain - they want to fit in, be 'normal' and often under-report discomfort because they don't know its O.K. to say that they are in pain.

Fat people are strong and have normal flexibility but may have trouble reaching their full range-of-motion (ROM) unassisted. Large people benefit from mobility work for their joints and muscles.

Many obese people suffer from sleep apnea, asthma and other breathing problems. Many are unable to lay on their back or stomach for extended periods of time. If you can't breathe if you can't relax! I will work with you to find positions that are comfortable and effective.

The benefits of massage for the obese include: reducing chronic pain, inflammation and swelling; improving mobility and circulation. Massage can help increase the amount of exercise you're getting by helping your body recover from exercise faster. It can reduce physical and emotional stress and improve sleep.

For people who are more than 300 pounds, lying on a massage table may be uncomfortable. Even though my table is wider than average, it may be too narrow for a large person to get really comfortable. That's why I give my clients the option of working on the floor. Floor work greatly increases our options with regards to positioning, bolstering, and the amount of stretching and mobility work we can do. The important thing to remember, regardless of whether we're doing table or floor work is that the more comfortable you are, the more effective the massage will be!

I have clients who are active in the Fat Acceptance movement, others who have had the bariatric surgery to effect weight loss. In my opinion, there's value in looking at both sides of the question. So here's links to two organizations:

Chubby people live longest: Japan study

TOKYO (AFP) - Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.

People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

"We found skinny people run the highest risk," said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people.

"We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but didn't expect the difference to be this large," he told AFP by telephone.

The study was conducted by a health ministry team led by Tohoku University professor Ichiro Tsuji and covered 50,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79 over 12 years in the northern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi.

"There had been an argument that thin people's lives are short because many of them are sick or smoke. But the difference was almost unchanged even when we eliminated these factors," Kuriyama said.

Main reasons for the shorter lifespans of skinny people were believed to include their heightened vulnerability to diseases such as pneumonia and the fragility of their blood vessels, he said.

But Kuriyama warned he was not recommending people eat as much as they want.

"It's better that thin people try to gain normal weight, but we doubt it's good for people of normal physique to put on more fat," he said.

The study divided people into four weight classes at age 40 according to their body mass index, or BMI, calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their squared height in metres.

The normal range is 18.5 to 25, with thinness defined as under 18.5. A BMI of 25 to 30 was classed as slightly overweight and an index above 30 as obese.