Women who are obese may need to be overcome several significant mental blocks to help start exercising regularly, new research suggests.
For arachnophobes, it’s difficult to kill a spider as it scurries across the floor. Those who are scared to fly might not ever set foot on a plane. While nothing physically stops people with these aversions, a mental barrier can keep them from the task at hand.
The same could be said for obese women when it comes to physical activity, according to new research from Temple University in the US.
They say that obese women face a significant number of barriers when it comes to exercise, more so than their normal weight counterparts.
’This is the first time we’ve been able to systematically look at what stops obese women from getting the activity they need,’ said researcher and clinical psychologist Melissa Napolitano.
Napolitano and her team monitored 278 women, both normal weight and obese, enrolled in a yearlong physical activity encouragement study, following up on their progress after three and twelve months.
They found that there were a number of mental factors keeping women from getting exercise, the most common including feeling self-conscious; not wanting to fail; fearing injury; perceived poor health; having minor aches or pains and feeling too overweight to exercise.
Obese women reported greater barriers to being active than normal weight women. For obese women, barriers they identified at the beginning of the study predicted how much or how little they would be exercising at the 12 month follow-up.
’These might sound like excuses to some people, but for those who have these aversions, they’re real problems,’ said Napolitano.
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She believes that tailoring exercise programs to manoeuvre around these barriers is the key to curbing some of that aversion and improving adherence to a weight loss goal. She cites the popular Curves gyms as a step in the right direction, because they offer a comforting, welcoming environment for women to exercise in.
’There is an underlying attitude about weight loss, that it’s easy if you just eat less and exercise more,’ she said. ’But if losing weight were easy, we wouldn’t have the obesity epidemic we have today.’
Another recent study has found that people who feel constantly guilty about the reasons why they should exercise don’t lose weight – but people who focus on the positive steps they can take to exercise more do. To find out more, Click Here: Why Feeling Guilty Won’t Help You Lose Weight