Physical activity and extra sleep Obesity and general health can be influenced by both the amount of sleep and the amount of physical activity performed. Increasing your physical activity and the intensity with which you do it will help you fight obesity and improve your overall health. When a person loses weight, their overall active energy expenditure (AEE) is reduced, but with reduced body weight people tend to be more physically active, which will outweigh the reduction in AEE (Bonomi 2013). To reduce health risks a person must do more than simply sleep or be more active. General health in obese individuals also depends on modifying lifestyle and helping to maintain proper nutrition while reducing risk factors for cardiovascular disease (Strasser 2013). While sleep is important, it has minimal effects on nutrition, and minimal effects are achieved by doing more or less physical activity. Physical activity has a more powerful effect on obesity and health problems in general. Having more energy ingested than produced will cause weight gain and obesity. With our modern lifestyle, which involves a lot of sedentary time and reduced physical activity, the result can be obesity. Many factors, such as weight shift during physical activity, contribute to the amount of AEE (Bonomi 2013). A study on patients with a BMI > 27 kg/m2 shows that after energy restriction the patients' body weight was reduced by 14 kg ± 5 kg and although the AEE was decreased after weight loss, the amount of Time spent sedentary was reduced by adding +11 ± 21 minutes of walking, and + 4 ± minutes of cycling. (Bonomi 2013). Increasing levels of physical activity reduces the risk of having high blood pressure, which improves health and reduces the risks associated with obesity (Strasser 2013).L...... middle of document ...... ction. PLoS ONE, 8(3):e59641. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059641Danielsen KK, Svendsen M., Maehlum S., & Sundgot-Borgen J. (2013). “Changes in body composition, cardiovascular disease risk factors, and dietary behavior after an intensive lifestyle intervention with a high volume of physical activity in severely obese subjects: a prospective clinical controlled study. Journal of Obesity, 2013: 325464. doi: 10.1155/2013/325464St-Onge MP, Roberts AL, Chen J., Kelleman M., O'Keeffe M., Roychoudhury A., and Jones PJ (2011). Short sleep duration increases energy intake but does not change energy expenditure in normal weight individuals. Am J Clin Nutr, 14(2), 410–416. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.111.013904Strasser B. (2013). Physical activity in obesity and metabolic syndrome. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1281(1), 141–159. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06785.x