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Millennials, studies increasingly show, have it rough.
They have tons of debt, they’re quickly becoming the largest age group in the country, they’re unemployed, and now, it seems like they’re going to have a harder time staying at a healthy weight.
A study from York University’s Faculty of Health has now found that parents of millennials can eat more and exercise less, and lose as much weight as a millennial who eats less and exercises much more.
Professor Jennifer Kuk, one of the authors, said that the results were so drastic that “if you are 25, you’d have to eat even less and exercise more than those [who are] older to prevent gaining weight. However, it also indicates there may be other specific changes contributing to the rise in obesity beyond just diet and exercise.”
The study consisted of more than 36,000 adults who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Survey between 1971 and 2008. They also used data about physical activity about 14,400 adults between 1988 and 2006.
What they found was that people will be ten percent heavier in 2008 than they were in 1971.
It’s also a fact that even if you do lose the weight, it’s even harder to keep it off. The trick to a healthy weight is to make your weight loss into a lifestyle, which is more complex than losing it initially.
“Weight management is actually much more complex than ‘energy in’ versus ‘energy out,’” says Kuk. It’s more like a balance of factors. And it's a difficult balance to strike, especially if you had to really cut back food intake and really increase exercise habits to get there.
There are far more factors at play than there were in the past, such as lifestyle, environment, genetics, heightened stress, and medications that are stacked against millennials.
It really is unfortunate that weight loss will be harder for this younger generation, but it may lead researchers to figure out what other factors are at play aside from diet and exercise.
In the meantime, lets all get back to our much more strenuous weight loss plans, millenials!
