United States: Even a small amount of weight loss in midlife, about 6.5%, can reduce later health problems and death, scientists have found.
Losing just a small amount of weight — about 6.5% — naturally made a significant difference in how healthy people were as they aged, according to CNN.
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When you weigh 180 pounds, losing 12 pounds comes very close to your goal. On Tuesday, JAMA Network Open published the study, which considered data from people ages 18 to 64 over three periods, starting in the 1960s.
According to the study leader, Dr. Timo Strandberg, a professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Helsinki in Finland, “Although correcting midlife overweight without surgical or pharmacological treatment is challenging, our results suggest that it is feasible and may be associated with decreased long-term risk of cardiovascular diseases, other chronic conditions, and mortality outcomes associated with overweight,” US News reported.
At the start, researchers put participants into groups based on their BMI and tracked whether they gained, lost, or kept the same body weight.
Your body’s estimated fatness is determined by measuring your height and weight. After that, researchers looked into hospital and death records.
Individuals who successfully lost weight were less at risk for heart attack, stroke, cancer, asthma, and lung diseases, the study says.
Individuals with higher cardiovascular fitness were much less likely to die during the next 35 years.
Keep in mind that losing this much weight happened before many of today’s weight loss medicines and surgeries were used, US News reported.
Most of these healthy outcomes were the result of changing what someone eats and how much they move.
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