Some is Better than None

What's your knowledge like on physical activity and the impact it can have on your body?

Well what does the term physical activity mean? Physical activity is any bodily movement produced by the skeletal muscles which causes energy expenditure greater than at rest and which is health enhancing.

This definition is deliberately broad to incorporate all types of physical activity that can benefit health. This includes walking or cycling, dance, gardening, housework, individual or team based sport, and for children, active play.

In Ireland, almost 2 out of 3 adults (64.8%) engage in recreational walking.
4 out of 10 (43.9%) walk for transport compared with 1 in 10 (10.2%) who cycle for transport.
4 out of 10 (40%) people engage in individual focused sports compared with less than 1 in 10 (9.1) who engage in team focused sports.

Adults need to be active for at least 30 minutes a day at a moderate level of intensity, for 5 days a week, in order to meet the national guidelines for health enhancing physical activity. All bouts of moderate level activity that last for at least 10 minutes can count towards meeting this.

Children should take part in at least 60 minutes of active play throughout the day for their health and wellbeing. Active play includes games such as hopscotch, tag, hide-and-seek, skipping, jumping rope and ball games.

Only 1 in 3 Irish adults are sufficiently active on a regular basis to gain health benefits, although 2 out of 3 think they are sufficiently active. There is extensive evidence to show that being more active, more often can enhance your health and wellbeing, improve quality of life and help you live longer by reducing the risk of: heart disease, depression, dementia, type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, and colon cancer.

What about sedentary behaviour?
Sedentary behaviour refers to any waking activity that is characterised by an energy expenditure of ≤1.5 metabolic equivalents and a sitting or reclining posture. Common sedentary behaviours include TV viewing, video game playing, computer use, driving and reading. 

Just over 1 in 4 adults in Ireland spend 8 hours or more a day sitting. On average, Irish adults spend 6.5 hours a day sitting. People who watched the most TV in a 8.5-year study had a 61% greater risk of dying than those who watched less than 1 hour per day. The evidence is that even if you exercise regularly, sitting for 6 hours or more a day increases your risk of death by 40% compared with someone who sits for less than 3 hours a day. A high level of moderate intensity physical activity limits the increased risk of death associated with sitting for long periods of time.

Health benefits of physical activity
There is significant evidence that physical activity of moderate intensity promotes physical and mental health and wellbeing, prevents disease and improves quality of life. These benefits apply to all people irrespective of gender, ethnic background, ability, disability, weight, or age.

Wider health benefits of regular physical activity
There are a number of wider health benefits of regular physical activity including healthy aging, establishing social connections, and the enhancement of wellbeing in the workplace.

Physical activity and weight
Regular physical activity can help to maintain a healthy weight or lose weight. Even if an individual does not lose weight they will gain health benefits from being more active. To achieve and maintain a healthy weight they may need to change their diet as well as increase activity. To avoid gaining weight, they need to be more active than the guidelines recommend - approximately 60 minutes a day of brisk walking or 30 minutes of jogging. To lose weight, individuals may need to do 60 - 75 minutes of brisk walking a day. If they have a very high BMI (30 or above) or are extremely inactive, they should start with bouts of 10 minutes and gradually increase the duration and intensity until they reach the adult guideline of at least 30 minutes a day.

Some practical tips
Identify regular times in your day when you can be active.
Be active with a friend or in a group.
Choose an activity that you enjoy.
Make your commute to work, school or shops more active.
Start today - it is never too late.

Summary
Regular physical activity is strongly linked with better health and a lower risk of illness and disease.
Healthcare professionals have an important role to play in influencing patients' physical activity habits.
Conversations about physical activity need to be undertaken in a sensitive and non-judgemental way.

4 key messages
Some is better than none.
Start with short bouts of 10 minutes and build up to 30 minutes a day.
The more you do - the more benefits you get.
Walking is free, easy and low risk and you can fit it into your everyday routine.

For more information - see Making Every Contact Count (MECC).

Check out the Get Ireland Active website and your local sports partnerships for more information.

"This is (probably) why you're Fat"



If you just consume fewer calories you'll lose weight. Unfortunately not always.

Most of us think that we only put fat in our fat cells when we eat too much. Your fat cells are like rechargeable fuel cells, every time you eat, you store some fat. In between meals, fat comes out of your fat cells to provide the fuels for your muscles and organs. If you're naturally thin, it's because you have efficient fat cells. Fat goes in quickly and comes out easily. Your body doesn't need much fat because the small bit of fat you do have is a reliable source of fuel. If you're predisposed to be fat, it's because you have 'greedy fat cells'.

 

When you eat you tend to store calories as fat instead of burning them. And when your other tissues need those calories, the fat comes out slowly, if it comes out at all. So if you don't eat, you start to starve at the cellular level. So you do exactly what your body is telling you to do - you eat more. In other words,

 

You're not getting fat because you're eating more,

You're eating more because you're getting fat!

 

 

If your fat cells are slow to release fuel, your body actually works to make them bigger. And they keep on getting bigger until they can release the energy that your body needs. This could mean gaining a little weight or it could mean gaining a lot! It all depends on how slowly your fat-cells release their fat. Most of us aren't born with 'greedy fat-cells', but we can certainly make them that way. When you eat too many carbohydrates, you raise your blood sugar. Since high blood sugar is toxic, your body releases insulin to bring it down. But your body can only burn a little bit of sugar at a time. So what happens to the rest of it? Your storage sites for carbohydrates are limited and you've got unlimited storage places for fat. So the body just ends up converting the carbs in to fat. And after bringing down your blood sugar, your insulin does its other job, it tells your body to store fat.

Insulin stimulates an enzyme called lipoprotein-lipase which sends fat into the fat cells. So if insulin is elevated, this lipoprotein-lipase production is really activated and it sends fat 'like crazy' into the fat cells. So if you eat a lot of carbohydrates, your insulin goes up and you begin storing fat in the fat cells.

Intra-abdominal (visceral) fat is a major culprit for insidious
effects to a person's health including; cardiovascular
disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

When you have a healthy metabolism, it only takes a little bit of insulin to bring your blood sugar down and then everything goes back to normal. But over time, that can change. Cells can become resistant to the effects of insulin, so when that happens, insulin is talking with the cells, but they're not listening! They don't do what they're supposed to do. And so your body does what it has to do, it starts producing more insulin. So you've reached a point where your insulin is high just to keep your sugar levels normal, even if your not eating any sugar. When that happens, your insulin is driving fat into the fat cells and you've reached this point where all of a sudden - Bam! You get fat.

And you get fat even though you're eating the same number of calories you always did. Because now you have greedy fat-cells. So you do what the ''experts'' tell you to do, you go on a low fat, low calorie diet so you can burn your own body fat for fuel. But there's just one little problem with this: if too many carbs are keeping your insulin high, the insulin is telling your body to store the fat instead of burning it. Now you're really starving inside!

So once again your body does what it has to do: it slows down your metabolism. You stop losing weight and you get tired. And people can end up being, in most cases, larger than they were when they started out - but now with a lower metabolic rate. And this can be extremely frustrating for many people.

For every pound of fat you put on, you gain 7 new miles of blood vessels!

So some people get fat and stay fat because they're living on foods that tell their body to store the calories in their fat cells - which just makes you hungrier. In some people the fat-cells and the other tissues become insulin resistant at about the same rate. The good news for them is that they don't gain weight, the bad news is that insulin resistance can kill you even if you're skinny.

The demanding of your pancreas that it produce ever greater amounts of insulin to keep your blood sugar normal, is ultimately going to cause 'beta-cell burnout'. So the pancreas is producing all it can produce and that's not enough anymore. When that happens, the beta-cells get damaged, they can't produce anymore and your blood sugar goes up and now you're becoming diabetic. And further, when your blood sugar goes out of control, it can damage your arteries and lead to heart disease.



It's not easy struggling with something that keeps you alive. But you can blame away, you are in charge of yourself. There's no one giant step that does it, it's a lot of little steps. And that doesn't just relate to putting the weight on, but also for getting rid of it. Human nature is very addictive and human nature is very flawed. It is extraordinary that it takes such a long time for the penny to drop with some people. But it shouldn't be a surprise as the seeds of it are really deep. All the problems of being overweight are remedial. But the younger you put it on the bigger you can go. And the further you let yourself go, the longer of a battle it is to get back (O'Shea, 2012).

~ (Fat Head, 2009)

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''I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people'' ~ Rodney Dangerfield