Does losing weight improve your sex life?

Way back in March, someone asked the question, “How does being overweight affect the quality of your sex life?” on our Have A Question page.  So, I asked who wanted to be involved in a long-term study to see if there’s a connection between getting fit and better sex.

About 2 dozen people checked in every week (or close to every week) and marked down how they were doing with their fitness level, weight, how often they had sex that week, and whether it was better, worse or the same.

I know, not exactly laboratory conditions and it’s highly subjective.  It’s what I could do.  Feel free to run your own study if it bothers you.  I finally go around to looking at the data today, and here’s what I found.

Losing weight improves your sex life

Yes, it seems that losing weight improves your sex life.  It wasn’t a strong correlation (0.53 for those who are interested in the coefficient), but fairly moderate.  That’s not really surprising, though, is it?

Losing weight can do a lot of things to our sex lives:

• Losing even as little as 10lbs can boost sex-related hormones.  In particular, it frees up more testosterone.
• Eating better improves how our bodies work, and generally we eat better when we are trying to lose weight.
• Healthier weight promotes better blood flow, which is critical for arousal (both in women and in men).
• Becoming lighter allows us to move better and faster.
• Losing extra fat can allow for better connection to erogenous zones during sex, because there’s less of a barrier in the way.
• It’s claimed that for every 30lbs of fat a man loses, an extra inch of his penis will be uncovered from the base where it was previously hidden by fat.

So, losing weight definitely can improve your sex life.  However, I found something that works even better.

Feeling good about your fitness improves your sex life even more

In addition to their weight, we also asked the people in the study how they felt about their overall health and fitness on a scale of 1-10 for the week.  That doesn’t mean how they felt about their body, but rather, how they felt about how they were being good stewards of it that week.  You could be 100lbs overweight, but if you feel you did a great job this week working on making a difference, then you might still score a 10.

Like I said, it’s very subjective.  However, there’s a stronger correlation (0.66 coefficient) between how you feel about your fitness, than about the actual change in your weight.  Now, really for a shock?

Now, really for a shock?  If you take out all the men and only look at the women in the study (who were very brave to share their weight regularly!), you see almost a perfect correlation between how they felt about their fitness and health management that week, and how much they enjoyed sex.  A 0.99 coefficient (1.0 is perfect)!

I’ve said it many times, but now I actually have proof.  For women, it’s less about what their body is like, and far more about how they feel they are doing with that body.  They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be happy with the effort they’re putting in.  That’s hard, because too often women focus on the results, and not the effort.

But, there’s great news here.

It’s not too late to start working on your fitness

Many people, women in particular, give up on their fitness level because they feel it’s too late.  They’ll never be skinny, so why bother.  But it’s not about being skinny.  It’s about being a good steward.  You don’t have to make up for all the time that’s past.  You need to account for your convictions from this day forward.

The good news is working on it, even if the results aren’t there, is still beneficial.  Not only to your relationship with God, but also to your relationship with your spouse.

So, don’t wait, start today.  What are you going to do to be a better steward?  The reward might be better sex.