Ask the Expert: Exercise IS Medicine

(KUTV) Everyone wants a magic pill to lose weight and improve their health. Fortunately, there is one. It's called exercise. For one local doctor, using exercise to improve health isn't just something he tells his patients; it hits closer to home.

Dr. Randall Steinfeldt recalls always being the tall-skinny kid growing up. Then things began to change after years of medical school. By the time he finished residency he weighed close to 280 pounds.

"I was buying 42" pants. I was depressed. I had regular headaches, and my energy level was poor," describes Dr. Randall Steinfeldt from the Intermountain North Ogden Clinic.

As a physician, he started feeling a bit hypocritical and decided it was time to get his health back. He started by changing the way he ate and lost about 35-40 pounds. But what he says made the biggest difference in the way he felt was consistently exercising.

"The benefits of exercise extend way beyond the ability to lose weight," says Dr. Steinfeldt.

Dr. Steinfeldt has taken his personal experience and used it as a guide to treating patients. He emphasizes the ways diet and specifically exercise can be used as medicine.

"Eighty percent of your effectiveness at losing weight has to do with what you eat; only about 20% with what you do," explains Dr. Steinfeldt.

However, when it comes to improving your overall health, those numbers are reversed. Eighty percent of your health benefits come from exercise and only 20% come from what you eat. This is why everyone needs to get at least 150 minutes of exercise every week. Dr. Steinfeldt recommends having that be 30 minutes, five days a week.