Dieters who arranged to spill the weight by their excess burden have to do 90 few minutes practice (exercise) a day to keep the pounds off in the long term, according to a study. The finding comes as a leading nutritional researcher called on world leaders to tackle obesity with the same urgency as global efforts to tackle climate change.

According Rena Wing, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, that American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston yesterday that exercising 60 to 90 minutes a day was essential to long term fast weight loss. By studying data on more than 5,000 men and women who have, on average, lost 70 pounds and kept the weight off for six years, she found that successful dieters had high levels of physical activity and consciously controlled their eating habits.

"There's no way around it," Wing said. "If you want to fast weight loss and keep it off you need to really change your lifestyle, particularly if you're overweight or have a family history of obesity. The obesity epidemic won't go away simply because people switch from whole to skimmed milk.

In Britain more than one-fifth of adults are obese and, of the remainder, half of men and a third of women are overweight. Obesity is linked to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. By 2015, 2.3 billion adults are forecast to be overweight, including 700 million obese.

Philip James, of the International Obesity Taskforce, told the seminar urgent steps were needed to transform the environment that makes people fat. He said that obesity was a problem for all of society, arguing that blaming individuals for their vulnerability to gain weight was no longer acceptable when the "environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic".

He added: "It is even more naive to tell people that they just need to make a little change in their eating habits or their daily activity and suddenly the obesity problem will be remarkably easily solved."

The Source : the Guardian on Monday February, 18,  2008

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