Even modest weight loss can add a lot to your sex life, according to a Duke University psychologist. Martin Binks presented a study to The Obesity Society that showed men and who who lost just 10 percent of their body weight felt much better about their sex lives than those who lost no weight.

At the outset, 68 percent of women said they felt sexually unattractive. One year into the diet, only 26 percent did. About 63 percent originally did not want to be seen undressed, but only 34 percent felt that way a year later.

Initially, 21 percent of women said they were not enjoying sex; only 11 percent said so after one year.

“The number of males in the study does limit what we can say about men,” but feelings of unattractiveness and unwillingness to be seen naked also applied to them, Binks said. Even when many of them wanted to have sex, the excess weight made it an ordeal.

(Houston Chronicle)

The more researchers look, the more they find that regular exercise really is a cure-all.

Now, evidence is mounting that regular exercise helps moderate the symptoms of menopause.

One study, published last year in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, followed 353 women through a four-year diet and exercise program and found it was able to slow the progression of menopause-related atherosclerosis.

Exercise also can battle the weight gain often caused by a slower metabolism.

”The health benefits of exercise go far beyond management of menopause symptoms,” says Dr. Carol Mangione, a University of California, Los Angeles professor of medicine and chair of the NIH panel. “In your early 50s is a time when lifestyle interventions can really change the trajectory of chronic disease and functional decline as you age.”

(Miami Herald)

Aerobic exercise stimulates genes in the body to produce new blood vessels that allow more oxygen to reach muscles, increasing their effectiveness.

A new study has shown that in some people, this genetic switch may never be triggered - limiting their benefits from aerobic exercise.

“Our study introduces a new complication — that is, it is possible that some people can’t benefit from exercise as much as others, and these people may ultimately be at greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease,” Timmons, a scientist at the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, told Discovery News.

He added, “On a practical level, the low responders may simply have to invest much more time and effort training to gain the same benefits. This last point is, however, only speculation. The low-responders may always remain low-responders.”

(Discovery.com)

MSNBC.com has a story about a study published in the medical journal “Chest” that looked at heart health and exercise intensity.

According to researchers, the amount of exercise was more important than the intensity.

In journal CHEST, researchers from North Carolina report that people who walk briskly for 12 miles per week or for about 125 to 200 minutes per week will significantly improve their aerobic fitness and lower their risk of developing heart disease.

“Anything beyond walking briskly for 12 miles per week, whether increasing your intensity or the amount of miles, has additional benefits,” Brian D. Duscha from Duke University Medical Center in Durham who was involved in the research said. “So there is a separate and combined effect.”

(MSNBC.com)

According to the Washington Post, practicing the most popular form of yoga will yield strength, flexibility, endurance, balance, and flexibility - but not a significant amount of calories.

…women participated in three 55-minute hatha classes a week; the others were barred from any form of intentional exercise. The yoga group showed improvements in strength, endurance, balance and flexibility but burned only 144 calories in a session, similar to the energy consumption of a slow walk.

ACE said in a statement that its study was the first to examine the aerobic potential of hatha yoga. Research published last summer linked regular yoga practice with successful weight control, but those findings were based on subjects’ self-reported behavior — a notoriously unreliable method — and did not consider whether respondents engaged in other exercise.

Some experts contend that yoga can provide an aerobic workout, provided the poses are done quickly, repetitively and linked together.

“The key questions,” he said, “are: What postures did they do? How fast? How long did they hold them? How did they link them together?” Hatha beginners cannot expect significant aerobic benefit, Schumacher said, because it takes time to learn how to do the poses correctly before increasing intensity. In fact, Porcari led a companion study of 15 people that showed that power yoga, in which participants move rapidly through hatha poses, burned about 237 calories in 50 minutes and boosted heart rates to 62 percent of maximum on average — a light aerobic workout.

But, Porcari cautions, the more aerobic the yoga practice, the less benefit practitioners derive in flexibility and relaxation. “By moving quickly through the poses, you will not get the same [muscle and tissue] stretch as you would in slower poses.