Mental Barriers Prevent Obese Women from Getting Adequate Amounts of Exercise
By Hugh C. McBride
A Temple University study has determined that – in addition to the various physical challenges that they face – many obese women are prevented from getting adequate amounts of exercise because of a variety of mental barriers.
Members of Temple’s kinesiology department joined with researchers from the school’s Center for Obesity Research and Education to analyze data that had been collected from 278 women over the course of one year. According to an Oct. 9 article on the Health Day News website, obese women who participated in the study reported a greater number of mental or emotional obstacles to exercise than did women with lower body mass indices:
The women completed a questionnaire when the study began and during three- and 12-month follow-up assessments. The questionnaire dealt with mental barriers to exercise, including [the following]:
· Feeling self-conscious.
· Not wanting to fail.
· Fearing injury.
· Perceived poor health.
· Having minor aches and pains.
· Feeling too overweight to exercise.
At every assessment, the obese women reported greater barriers to exercise than their normal weight counterparts. The barriers that the obese women identified at the beginning of the study predicted how much they would be exercising at the 12-month follow-up.
Melissa Napolitano, an associate professor of kinesiology and a clinical psychologist with the Center for Obesity Research and Education, said in a university-issued press release that the Temple study was one of the first efforts to qualify and quantify the range of reasons that obese women don’t get enough exercise.
“There is an underlying attitude about weight loss, that it's easy if you eat less and exercise more,” Napolitano said in the release. “But if losing weight were easy, we wouldn't have the obesity epidemic we have today.”
The results of the Temple study were presented Oct. 5 in Phoenix, Arizona, during the annual scientific meeting of The Obesity Society.
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