Research at Harvard Medical School has proved that- exercise is not only important to losing weight, it helps you keep it, and even more importantly, can delay aging related problems, as well as diabetes. There is even more in the baffling news in the study. Read on to find out.

The study led by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, shows that exercise has a multitude of long term benefits. It shows remarkable new insights into how exercise affects the body at a cellular level by releasing a hormone called “Irisin” that reduces a person’s susceptibility to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. This hormone doesn’t just stick to the organs but floats towards the fat stored in the body & starts to convert it into brown fat. And as we’ve told you before, brown fat helps you burn more fat. The primary purpose of brown fat is to regulate body temperature: the mitochondria-packed cells are designed to burn high quantities of sugar, the body's fuel, and release that energy as heat.

Currently, most people who want to lose weight focus on watching their diet, but don’t really care to exercise. What happens in those cases where you only watch your diet to lose weight, is that since there has not been any change in your body chemistry (due to the lack of exercise), you may lose some weight temporarily, but after your weight loss diet, you soon gain the weight back. Only dieting is the main reason why most weight loss programs fail to keep the weight off for long. Note, that walking is not exercise enough. Exercise requires a little more effort, and that’s how you can get the benefits revealed in this study.

So, the big reason why most weight loss plans fail at long term weight loss is the lack of exercise along with the correct diet. The other big reason for failure to even show results is the self prescription of weight loss programs.