EXERCISE IS IMPORTANT
For middle-aged women who aren’t counting calories, how much exercise does it take to keep off extra weight? According to a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association , roughly an hour per day. Though current recommendations from the Department of Health and Human Services suggest that a weekly 150 minutes (or half hour five days per week) of moderate exercise—activities like hiking—is enough for weight maintenance, after up to 13 years of follow-up with more than 34,000 women in this latest study, researchers found that maintaining a healthy weight required more than double that amount of moderate physical activity . What’s more, for women who were already overweight, exercise on its own wasn’t enough to help them get back down to a normal range body mass index (BMI). Examining the impact of exercise alone, only women who were at a normal BMI at the study’s onset were able to maintain their healthy body weight—and they did it throug