weight affects exercise

How Your Weight Affects Your Opinion of Exercise

The interesting link between your brain and your BMI


If you're overweight and prefer your sofa over the Stairmaster, that resistance might be all in your head—literally.

See, a recent study published in The International Journal of Obesity suggests that overweight women's brains are turned off by physical activity—and are turned on by thoughts of lounging or relaxing. (And the opposite was found to be true for lean women: Their brains were positively stimulated by images of people mid-workout.)

Here's how the two-part study, performed by scientists with the Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality at Southwest University in China, went down: Thirteen healthy young women of normal weight and 13 overweight or obese young women were asked if they thought exercise was desirable and if they expected it to be unpleasant.

The participants were then shuffled inside an MRI scanner and shown two sets of pictures: people enjoying exercise and people exhibiting sedentary behaviors. They were asked to imagine themselves doing these activities from inside the machine and, while doing so, the MRI scanned their brain activity.

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The results? When overweight women were shown the images of people working out, the area of the brain that processes urges to like things—called the putamen—demonstrated little activity, suggesting that they didn't enjoy what they saw. Plus, the area of the brain that deals with negative emotions lit up at those same images.

Meanwhile, the putamens of the lean study participants lit up at the thought of exercising, suggesting they look forward to it. These findings looped back to the answers the participants had given before the MRI: Overweight women said they expected exercise to end in "embarrassment" from not doing it well or correctly (we've all had that flying-off-the-treadmill nightmare, right?).

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All this leads to a chicken-and-egg-type conundrum: Do overweight people weigh more because they don't look forward to working out, or do they avoid working out because they're overweight? While that question remains to be answered with future studies, it is clear that there is some correlation between the two.

Lead study author Todd Jackson told the New York Times that if you're overweight and you dread exercise, you could try a strategy of rewarding yourself for working out more. For instance, allow yourself to watch Scandal only after you've finished 30 minutes of strength training.



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