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" For many of us, exercise induces the same feelings of righteousness that other people get from going to church \u2014 and if we don&amp;#039;t exercise, we feel morally inferior. But it&amp;#039;s not religion. It&amp;#039;s not even a good deed. It&amp;#039;s just exercise. Yes, there are hundreds of studies showing that people who exercise are healthier in many ways. However, it&amp;#039;s easy to jump from &amp;quot;exercise appears to reduce our risk factors for certain diseases&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;exercise has been proven to stop all disease&amp;quot; and then on to &amp;quot;if you get sick, it&amp;#039;s your own damned fault for not exercising.&amp;quot; This is why so many women either become obsessed with exercise or toss up their hands and give up altogether. People who work out do seem to have lower rates of heart disease and certain cancers, including breast cancer. But they also tend to have other healthy habits: They eat well, weigh less, don&amp;#039;t smoke, and report less stress. So we don&amp;#039;t really know whether exercise makes people healthier or whether healthy people tend to exercise more. What we do know: Exercise has great potential benefits and a lower side-effect profile than most heart medications.  Doesn&amp;#039;t physical activity help us take off the pounds? Sadly, not for most of us. A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that exercise alone did not lead to weight loss except at fairly high levels \u2014 say, jogging 20 miles per week \u2014 and even then, the subjects lost only about 4 percent of their weight. One reason: Exercise makes you hungry. One year, for instance, Susan ran a half marathon. Afterward, she had a burger, fries, and a beer \u2014 and downed more calories than she burned during the race. You can see this as depressing news, or you can find it liberating. Now that you know exercise doesn&amp;#039;t usually lead to weight loss, you can relax and enjoy your workouts for other reasons.  On the other hand, are you relatively young, healthy, and busy? Well... then not exercising might be a reasonable choice for you. Women&amp;#039;s lives occur in phases, and some phases \u2014 especially young motherhood, career-building, and caregiving \u2014 allow less time for self-maintenance than others. The general consensus on how much exercise you should get is 30 minutes of moderate activity or 20 minutes of more intense activity, most days of the week. There will be times in your life when 20 to 30 minutes of activity is more than you can do in a week, let alone a day.  You can certainly choose to wait out a difficult time of life. But exercise is not an either/or proposition. Quite a few studies show the benefits of supershort workouts. You could probably sprint across the yard every now and then, right? (Note that we said &amp;quot;sprint,&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;lope.&amp;quot;) How about running up and down the stairs or doing pushups while the coffee brews?  When your schedule allows, you can resume more conventional workouts. For now, relax. You&amp;#039;re probably pretty healthy already, just as you are. Pretty Healthy Exercise Solutions It might not help you lose weight, but there are many other terrific reasons to work out. (Really.) Boost your mood. Do you suffer from depression, anxiety, or insomnia? Regular workouts may be able to pull you through a difficult time. Exercise has been found to be just as effective as medication in reducing severe to moderate depression, for instance. And in one study, panic-attack sufferers who worked out found more relief from their symptoms than those who took an antianxiety medication or a placebo. Research also shows that exercise during the day can lead to better sleep at night.  Improve existing health concerns. Though it&amp;#039;s unclear whether exercise can improve your odds of avoiding cardiovascular problems down the road, it makes sense to try it if you have risk factors for heart disease. So if you&amp;#039;re obese and/or you have high blood sugar, we hope you&amp;#039;ll do something to get moving. (Anything \u2014 even a 10-minute walk at lunch \u2014 is better than nothing.)  Be stronger and more independent. When you can&amp;#039;t carry your groceries, shovel snow, or raise your garage door by hand when the remote breaks, you lose some of your independence. In these situations, weight training can help.  Women are also told to lift weights to increase bone density so we can avoid osteoporosis. There is more to osteoporosis than bone density, however. The quality and micro-architecture of the bone are also important, as are your overall weight (being thin is the number-one predictor of osteoporosis) and genes. You can&amp;#039;t store up extra bone density when you&amp;#039;re young and then &amp;quot;spend&amp;quot; it when you&amp;#039;re older. You don&amp;#039;t want to go into menopause with weak bones if you can help it, but any real-life weight training you&amp;#039;re doing \u2014 lifting children, hauling the garbage out \u2014 should be plenty. Adapted from Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won&amp;#039;t Break Your Health by Alice D. Domar, Ph.D., Susan M. Love, M.D. From RealAge.com: Get more health advice here. MORE FROM THIS SERIES:  - How Much Sleep Do You Need  - The Surprising Benefits of Stress   - You May Not Be As Unhealthy As You Think "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/body/health-fitness/advice/a5774/benefits-of-exercise/>