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A study which looked at the effects of exercise on fatness in adolescent girls found that activity dropped in adolescence, leading to increased levels of overweight and obesity. There's no mystery about weight gain. If you put in more than you take out, on goes the fat. Adolescence is increasingly a time when such a slide occurs, especially in girls. One US study following girls through puberty has shown a doubling of the rate of obesity and overweight during those years even though what they ate didn't change much. Girls are also known to reduce their physical activity around puberty. This same study has quantified the effects of exercise on fatness in adolescent girls. Following over 2000 girls from the ages of nine to nineteen, measuring many things including the energy burned in exercise each week, they found the girls who were most active to begin with tended to stay more active and the gap widened in later years, but in all girls, activity dropped in adolescence. Allowing for other factors, the increased levels of overweight and obesity closely followed the children's exercise. Using brisk walking or its equivalent: for each hour less per week, there was a corresponding gain in weight. It means that an urgent priority is to find ways of increasing adolescent girls' exercise. Putting sport back into state schools would be one suggestion.
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