Written by Stuart Stevens | Tuesday, 19 February 2008
all the organs in your body such as your heart begin to age 
Scientific research done at the Washington University School of Medicine shows that by losing weight you can restore the youthfulness of your heart. The researchers said that the heart benefited irrespective of whether you lost weight by eating less calories or by burning more calories. The researchers examined the hearts of 25 healthy but nevertheless overweight adults of middle age and saw that when they lost weight their heart became more elastic which made it easier for it to relax in between muscular contractions when it pumps blood around the body.
The research which was published in the American Journal of Physiology was led by Dr Sandor Kovacs and he said that if people wanted to do something to improve the health of their heart it was essential to lose weight and it really didn’t matter in which way they lost it as exercise and diet were seen to be equally beneficial for the heart. He said that they were “virtually guaranteed” to improve the cardiovascular function of their heart.
When you get older it is not just your skin which appears to look older but all the organs in your body such as your heart also begin to age and it does so by becoming stiffer. Excess weight is also shown to make the heart stiffer which means that it takes more time to pump blood around the body.
This study is important because it shows that you don’t have to diet and exercise but by just doing one of them you will improve the health of your heart. The researchers divided the volunteers and made some of them cut calorie intake daily to lose weight while the others were told to exercise every day in order to burn more calories. The idea was that this second group would burn roughly the same amount of calories as the first group had cut out from their diets.
Losing weight does not just improve the elasticity and health of your heart but also has a beneficial effect on many different aspects of your health. It will also improve your quality of life too so get moving and get thin and fit!