The key is how much exercise you do, regardless of your weight.
Research increasingly supports what you already know: Exercise is the most powerful healthy tool you have in your fight against old age and disease. The latest findings, from a study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, show that basically not exercising is as bad as being obese.
Researchers from the Netherlands spent 15 years studying the height, weight, exercise habits, body mass index, and rate of heart disease and stroke of 5,344 middle-aged people in Rotterdam (participants were divided across three weight categories: normal weight, overweight, and obesity) and found that being overweight or obese was linked to a higher rate of heart disease and stroke. It is not surprising. What was surprising to the researchers was that the overweight or obese participants who exercised regularly had similar rates of heart disease to those of the normal-weight participants.
In other words, it doesn’t have so much to do with your weight, but how much exercise you do. One caveat: The researchers were quick to add that even those who did little exercise reported getting at least two hours of moderate exercise per day. For most, that’s a lot of exercises, but many of the participants reported walking or biking for work or errands. Therefore, it is difficult to generalize these results to populations outside of Rotterdam.
This also does not mean that obesity is no longer a risk factor for heart disease; however, the study suggests that:
a) the benefits of exercise could overcome some of the dangers of obesity
b) it’s never too late to start benefiting from exercise