some women have a complete phobia of exercise

Melissa Napolitano from Temple University in Philadelphia, America has recently headed research which shows that many overweight and obese women have a whole lot of psychological mental blocks which prevent them from getting exercise. She claims that it is not just laziness that is causing the problem of lack of exercise but more complicated psychological influences.

The research teams saw that obese women have a complete ‘phobia of exercise’ and when they were asked came up with a whole list of reasons such as being self conscious about how they looked when exercising, a lack of self discipline, the fear of failure, the fear of injury, aches and pains and the perception that physical exercise was hard work.

A whole range of different size women were interviewed for this research and all of them were asked to exercise over a six month period. They were questioned at the beginning of the exercise program, three months into it and also when the program finished. Normal weight women gave far less reasons for not exercising than the obese women. Almost 300 different weight women were examined for this study.

At Ukmedix News we have often highlighted the psychological aspects of losing weight and while good nutritional advice is important it is also a good idea to examine any psychological issues you may have with eating and exercise. If you feel self conscious about exercising there are ways of getting around this. You can exercise at home or go to the gym at times when it is not busy.

You should also consider that you probably feel self conscious a great deal of the time if you are very overweight and that by not going to the gym you are more likely to feel self conscious a lot of the time than you will by getting exercise and thus losing weight.