Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed

In my own experience, diet had a much more dramatic effect on my day-to-day mood. Switching to basically a slow carb diet helped my mood and outlook tremendously.

EDIT: I wanted to add that exercise also has a great effect on my mood, but only temporarily. By following a consistent diet that (in my case) is low glycemic and high in protein, the stability of my mood was much greater than exercise alone.

I do not have time to read the whole paper right now, but one question I have about the results is the prescribed exercise. In my experience, the type of exercise I do can have very different affects in how it makes me feel afterwards. For example, my mood is stabilized for much longer if I do 15 minutes of interval sprints rather than a 30 minute run. Cycling will also make me feel much different than high-weight/low-rep weightlifting.

What I am getting at is that if the "exercise" routine was run for 30 minutes 2 time a week, I could easily see how that would not affect depression. However, if it was a regime of HIIT or heavy compound exercises (squat/deadlift/bench), I would be very surprised if people didn't see long term mood benefits.

Exercise for exercise alone is reason enough to keep doing it.

This needs to be reported as an invalid story to HN.

This is a case where the submitter has not read the article. The abstract clearly states that the intervention is NOT exercise. Rather it is "encouragement" to exercise. Basically they're nagging you to take a walk around the block.

So I'm not surprised that nagging a depressed person to go to the gym helps in any way, shape or form. It's pretty sad that someone would do this study, really.

Regular exercise is, in fact, good for the body, heart, and brain. I would get at least 45 minutes of exercise a week, although I've heard that more is better.

I'm annoyed that the study does not go into details about what the "physical activity" consisted of. The only thing it says is "self reported level of physical activity (≤1, 2-3, ≥4 days per week, with at least 30 minutes of moderate or vigorous intensity physical activity)" which does not mean much.

Anecdotally speaking, lifting heavy weights vastly improves my mood. This is in contrast to, say, cardio, which simply makes me feel tired. I wish the study had accounted for this too.

Rhino55 - your account appears to be banned, your comment is showing as dead.