Plan B Forum

It is common knowledge that a sedentary lifestyle can lead to obesity, which is a common cause of diabetes, high blood pressure and joint damage.

However, experts now want to treat lack of exercise as a medical condition in its own right.

Dr Michael Joyner, from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, made the case in the latest edition of The Journal of Physiology.

He said those who failed to work out for months such as office workers tied to their desks were damaging their health, whether they were overweight or not.

Prolonged lack of exercise causes the body to become deconditioned causing changes throughout the body. The heart rate may rise excessively during physical activity, bones and muscles can waste, blood volume can decline and stamina wane.

When deconditioned people try to exercise, they may tire quickly and experience dizziness or other discomfort, which makes many give up.

Dr Joyner said: 'I would argue that physical inactivity is the root cause of many of the common problems that we have.

'If we were to medicalise it, we could then develop a way, just like we've done for addiction, cigarettes and other things, to give people treatments, and lifelong treatments, that focus on behavioral modifications and physical activity.

'Then we can take public health measures, like we did for smoking, drunken driving and other things, to limit physical inactivity and promote physical activity.'

Several chronic medical conditions are associated with poor capacity to exercise, including chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome better known as POTS, a syndrome marked by an excessive heart rate and flu-like symptoms when standing or a given level of exercise.

Dr Joyner said medics were too quick to prescribe medication rather than exercise

Too often, medication rather than progressive exercise is prescribed, Dr. Joyner said. He noted that a study from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that three months of exercise training can reverse or improve many POTS symptoms.

Dr Joyner said if physical inactivity were treated as a medical condition itself rather than simply a cause or byproduct of other illnesses, doctors may become more aware of the value of prescribing supported exercise. He added that more formal rehabilitation programs that include cognitive and behavioral therapy would develop.

Sean wrote:I've found a cure!

Go for a walk you lazy bastards!

When do I pick up my Nobel prize?

fat people are gaining more ground every day

Would you take dieting advice from a man who has branded the obese as "mentally ill"?

If you have tried the smash-hit Dukan diet, you already have.

Dr Pierre Dukan, the millionaire author behind the best-selling nutrition books has said that the heavily overweight have "a mental problem".

He told the Mail on Sunday's You magazine: "I've never seen an obese person who has said, 'I am well in the mind.'"


The infamous doctor admits that he feels for the audience to which his books are targetted. "I suffer for them ... I like them because they are not really ill, like with the cancer, but feel they are outside of society.... I want to help."

He suggested that love may be the best dieting mechanism around (besides his plan, we presume): "Happiness stops food being a compensation. If you love a man, immediately you will reduce your intake of food – it’s automatic."

The Duchess of Cambridge's Berkshire-based mother, Carole Middleton, reportedly lost 34lbs using the controversial Dukan method, which sees a high-protein intake based around 100 permitted foods, with dieters instructed to phase the programme around four 'pillars'.

Launched in France in 2000, The Dukan Diet hit Australian bookshops in 2010 and has gone on to sell over 100,000 copies.

Similar to the equally contentious Atkins diet, as well as ketogenic and Weight Watchers diets, the programme has drawn wide-spread criticism, not least from French, British and American health bodies.

The diet was ranked 24th out of 25 in a best diets of 2012 list drawn up by US News and Health Report. Blasted for being too restrictive and rule-driven as well as bereft of medical evidence, one expert went as far as labelling the plan "idiotic".

But the diet author, who removed himself from the French medical register in May after being threatened for announcing that teenagers who maintain healthy weights should be given better school grades, remains unperturbed. "I am convinced deeply that for now, mine is the best [diet] on the market: it is the most healthy and the most ethical" he told You.

"My allowed foods are the foods of the old genes, the fruit of the hunter gatherer, the fish and vegetable."

As well as offending the overweight, Dukan did little for international relations. "We ’ave 22 million who are overweight and six and a half million obese, a little bit more man than woman. But yes, Frenchwomen resist better than Americans: when a Frenchwoman starts to put on pounds, she stops immediately. She has an allergy to weight'", he told Liz Jones in the interview.

Despite the criticism, Dukan's diet book topped the iTunes book chart until being knocked from the number one spot by the bizarre and faddish OMG diet, which condones missing breakfast and having a cold bath before a cup of coffee each morning.