The suggestion that people exercise an hour a day to lose pounds and maintain an ideal body weight is almost more than most people can contemplate.

An hour a day? Telling that to the time-pressed, traffic-stressed typical individual is enough to make many of us crawl back under the covers and into the elastic-waist pajamas.

Yet obesity experts warn that we cannot continue to eat as much as we do, exercise as little as we do and stay healthy. The good news is that we can add an hour of activity into our days with a little creativity.

While almost everyone could benefit from a planned, structured exercise program, that's not what we're talking about here. For most people, the starting point is to add activity into our days, experts say.

"We're very much in favor of going very slowly," said Steve Farrell, curriculum director at the Cooper Institute in Dallas, which specializes in exercise research. "Otherwise, it's like taking a car on a cold winter morning and going from zero to 60. It just doesn't work."


Not only does the body respond badly to an overzealous attempt to add an hour a day of activity — the mind doesn't like it, either. Expecting to go from sedentary to exemplary is a guarantee for failure, experts said. Read the entire article. "