Moderate Exercise May Be Belly-Fat Buster
Belly fat is dangerous. Not only is it unsightly and can cause your clothes to shrink at the cleaners, it puts strain on the body and releases molecules that travel throughout the body causing inflammation which has been linked with metabolic syndrome – the precursor to heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
But new research has revealed that the inflammation caused by belly fat can actually be reduced by exercise alone.
A study at the University of Illinois looked at the effects of diet and exercise on mice. After fattening up the mice for 6 weeks, the researchers put them into four groups — diet alone, exercise alone, diet and exercise together, and a control group – then watched to see which group would lose the weight fastest. Of course, the assumption was that the diet and exercise mice would lose the most weight.
Wrong. Although the diet and exercise mice did lose weight the researchers found that brief, regular exercise helped the mice just as much as diet alone or diet and exercise. The exercise-only mice also showed less insulin sensitivity, less fat in the liver, and less damage overall.
Researchers point out that the exercise-only mice weren’t working out that hard — the equivalent of a human doing a 30 to 45 minute walk five days a week. If that modest amount of exercise can decrease or prevent the life-threatening diseases caused by obesity, we may all be a few steps closer to beating the danger of belly fat.
