Weight-loss therapies

Dropping some pounds may help your back

Cindy Pickett developed lower-back pain at age 22 when she bent down, picked up two bricks for a bookcase she was building, and raced through the rain into her house. She immediately experienced severe pain shooting down her right leg, numbness in her right big toe, and a partial foot drop. Her doctor said she had two slipped disks. Over the years, back pain and other factors led to a 100-pound weight gain. Her back pain flared up every time she picked something up in the wrong way or twisted her spine.

In June of 2008, the Flagstaff, Ariz., high-school Spanish teacher retired and made weight loss her full-time job. Now age 59, she gets to the gym at 5:30 in the morning and swims for an hour five days a week, strength trains three days a week, and walks five days a week. Having failed many diets over the years, she finally found success with the South Beach Diet, which helped stop her carbohydrate cravings and made her feel less sleepy.

The combination of diet and exercise worked for Pickett; she reports that she has lost 30 pounds. "Since I lost weight, my back feels so much better. I stand differently and I walk differently, and I'm able to move more," she says. She also credits her back-pain relief to abdominal strengthening exercises, which have helped her get a flatter abdomen, reducing pressure on her lower back. As a bonus, she didn't have to take ibuprofen for pain all fall.

In medical studies, extra weight has been shown to increase the load on the spine, raising the risk of disk degeneration and other structural causes of lower- back pain. People who are obese may also have an increased lumbar curvature in the spine, which can cause lower-back pain. Compared with patients who are not overweight, obese patients are also more likely to have leg pain.

Losing weight may help with back-pain relief but it's not a panacea. In our survey, 24 percent of the respondents said they tried to lose weight to reduce back pain, but of those only 29 percent said weight loss helped a lot. Of course, it may be the case that some of those who tried to lose weight were not able to drop enough pounds to make a difference. While survey findings are not definitive about the effectiveness of weight loss, they clearly support the helpfulness of exercise.

Taken together, survey findings and medical evidence suggest that exercise and weight loss should be part of any back-pain treatment plan.