Bicycling helps weight control, study says

Want to avoid those extra pounds that come with age? Consider hopping on a bike.

A new study reports that women were less likely to gain weight if they walked briskly or if they bicycled compared with women who walked slowly or didn't exercise at all. The benefits of brisk walking -- defined as at least 3 miles a hour -- were already known, enshrined in government recommendations for at least 30 minutes of exercise five days a week. But bicycling has not been as well studied in terms of weight control.

Anne Lusk of the Harvard School of Public Health led a team that followed more than 18,000 healthy women in the Nurses Health Study II who were 25 to 42 years old in 1989. They answered questions every two years about their health but in 1989 and 2005 they were also asked about walking and bicycling.

After 16 years, the women gained an average of 20 pounds. Very few women said they were bicycling more than four hours a week in 1989, but women of normal weight who said they were bicycling that much in 2005 were 26 percent less likely than inactive women to have gained more than 5 percent of their body weight since 1989. For obese and overweight women, the difference was even greater. If they bicycled two or three hours a week in 2005, they were 46 percent less likely to gain that amount of weight than similar women who didn't exercise.

"Everybody gains weight as they age," Lusk said in an interview. "You put on fewer pounds if you bicycle."