Exercise and childhood obesity

Abstract

While obesity mainly results from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure, physical activity has to be part of prevention and treatment strategies, especially among children and adolescents. Increasing physical activity level mainly depends on the ability to perform exercise, necessitating an objective and accurate evaluation of physical fitness, both aerobic and anaerobic. While this chapter describes how overall fitness is altered by pediatric obesity, it also provides clinicians and practitioners with accurate direct and indirect methods of evaluation. Physical activity must be seen as more than a means to increase energy expenditure; it also favors particular compensatory responses in terms of both expenditure and intake that seem today necessary to consider in order to improve the efficacy of our interventions, as described in the last part of this chapter.