Dear V,

I am very scared that I am not getting enough exercise. I participate in intramurals and attend lots of classes at the gym, but I just feel like no matter what I do, I am not doing enough to stay in shape. I don’t have one of those obsessive disorders, and I love to eat, so it’s not like I have an eating disorder of any kind, I just hate feeling like I’m not doing enough. In all actuality, I feel like I could do more for my health, but with classes and friends, I just don’t have the time to really give it my all.

Health Worrier

Dear Reader,

Do you have this overwhelming feeling of underachievement in all aspects of your life? Do you feel like you don’t study enough or like you don’t spend enough time with your family and friends? If this sounds like you, I hate to break it to you, but you might be a perfectionist, which is alright. Secretly, everyone harbors some kind of perfectionist tendency. It’s only when your need for perfectionism is suddenly present in both the important and the mundane areas of your existence that you might have to reexamine your priorities and scale back a little somewhere.

According to the FDA, “exercise does not have to be strenuous to be beneficial,” which basically means that you don’t have to spend five hour chunks of your day at the gym in order to be healthy.

While exercise is effective for weight loss and weight control, it is also helpful to get an adequate amount of exercise to lessen your chances of developing heart disease and diabetes, amongst other diseases.

But, what is an adequate amount of exercise? Again, according to the FDA, “some studies show that short sessions of exercise several times a day are just as effective at burning calories and improving health as one long session,” which means that a few 10 or 15 minute walks each day could easily be substituted for one long haul on the elliptical machine.

Furthermore, say the experts over at the FDA, “to lose weight and to maintain a healthy weight after weight loss, many adults will likely need to do more than 30 minutes of moderate to intensive physical activity daily;” one can infer that unless you are trying to maintain weight loss or lose weight, about 30 minutes of exercise each day is a sufficient amount of time spent on exercising in order to stay in shape.

Best of Luck!

V.

Fact O’ the Day.Women find the body odor of more symmetrical men to be more attractive than the body odor of less symmetrical men.

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