Fitness
“It's the walking.” How 1 woman lost 25 lbs and transformed her mental health in 6 months
Welcome to Start TODAY. Sign up for our Start TODAY newsletter to receive daily inspiration sent to your inbox — and join us on Instagram!In late 2021, Jessica Miller, then 44, had a physical where she recalls, “Nothing was good. My cholesterol was terrible. My blood pressure was terrible. I needed to lose some weight.”
Her doctor asked if she was thinking about getting any exercise. “I said, ‘I was going to try to do something when I get older,’ and he said, ‘Older is today. It’s knocking. It’s here. Maybe you should jump in on that,’” she tells TODAY.
She says, “He wanted to put me on medication for blood pressure and cholesterol, but I don’t like taking medicine, and I’m not good at remembering to take it. So, he said, ‘Let’s try walking and see how it goes.’”
As a virtual teacher, Miller spends a lot of time sitting every day, and she needed something to counteract her inactivity. She had been what she calls a “stalker” on the Start TODAY Facebook page for a few months, and seeing how group members improved their lives through walking motivated her to give it a try.
Within six months, she:
- Saw significant drops in her blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
- Lost 25 pounds and has maintained that weight.
- Greatly improved her mental health.
Here’s how she did it.
She worked her way up to 10,000 steps a day
Miller was walking almost zero steps: “As many as it takes to get from my desk to the coffee machine.” When she started walking, she didn’t count her steps. She walked for 10 minutes, then 15 and then 20. After that, she started tracking her steps and worked up to 10,000 — sometimes more.
Most days, she wakes up around 5 or 5:30 a.m. and gets her steps in first thing in the morning. She uses audiobooks as motivation — she only plays them when she’s walking. “If I want to hear what happens in the book, I have to be walking to listen to it,” she says.
In the winter, when it’s cold near her Connecticut home, she switches to indoor walking at the mall. She tries to finish 10,000 steps in the morning, but if she doesn’t have time, she walks more in the afternoon or the evening with her boyfriend.
She’s also started walking to places like the grocery store, a friend’s house or a frozen yogurt shop. “I used to think, ‘I’m not walking someplace, that’s weird. I don’t want anyone to see me walking. They’re going to think I can’t drive or something,” she says. “Now I try to do it, and if I walk someplace, I have to walk home. That forces me to walk more.”
She turns to the Start TODAY group for encouragement. “If I don’t feel like doing something, I look on the Facebook page, and people are walking. They have all these other problems, but they’re still getting their steps in. If they can do it, so can I,” she says. “It’s motivating to see so many people going for walks and doing some exercise, and I have friends I’ve met through the page I keep up with.”
Miller also tries to do the Start TODAY monthly challenges, but she says walking has been the constant for her. “I know that’s what helped me,” she says. “I try to eat better, too, but I like to eat. Mostly, it’s the walking.”
In June 2022, she had the opportunity to appear on TODAY with Stephanie Mansour. “I was walking 10,000 steps a day by that time. My cholesterol had gotten better. My blood pressure was lower, and I had lost 25 pounds,” she says.
She kicked a heavy caffeine habit
Miller’s virtual teaching includes motivational classes for young girls from across the U.S. and around the world. “I have to be energetic. They want to talk and socialize. I don’t want them to be bored,” she says.
She turned to coffee for the caffeine boost. But she was overdoing it. She was starting her day with a pot of coffee, then adding mugs from her Keurig throughout the afternoon and evening — 20 cups a day.
She gradually shifted her intake down to about two cups of coffee a day. She had to take it slowly because cutting back too quickly gave her headaches.
First, she mixed regular coffee and decaf 50/50. “I had to trick myself into thinking it was regular, because I can’t tell the difference in the taste,” she says. Once she adjusted to that mix, she transitioned to only decaf in the afternoons and evenings. She also makes iced coffee, which lasts longer, since as the ice melts, it gets watered down.
She drinks a bottle of water before she has her first cup of coffee in the morning. “It’s the worst bottle of water ever, but it helps because then I don’t feel like I need to drink the whole cup of coffee really fast. When I have water first, I’m not as thirsty,” she says.
She also stopped drinking soda and alcohol. She felt like alcohol was affecting her sleep, and she didn’t want all the sugar and empty calories: “It wasn’t helping me with my stress. Exercise was doing a better job with that than sugary margaritas. It was easier to have water and go for a walk.”
Her lifestyle changes improved her mental health
I feel like all that negativity goes away when I’m walking. When I can get my steps in, I can clear my mind, and I feel better.
Jessica miller
Miller didn’t realize how her lifestyle habits were fueling stress, anxiety and negativity. “I didn’t think it was all connected. I just thought I had a lot of anxiety, and I was stressed out and hyper. On top of that, my clothes weren’t fitting, and I felt like I was lazy because I wasn’t working out,” she says. “I feel like all that negativity goes away when I’m walking. When I can get my steps in, I can clear my mind, and I feel better.”
She has noticed how her healthy habits all combine. “Exercising makes me feel better about myself and improves my mood, which makes me not want to eat junk food or drink coffee. I can change my mood by walking, and it changes my whole day. It gives me a chance to expend some energy and feel good about myself. Starting my day doing something positive makes my whole day better. It all comes together in a cycle.”
Her improved mental health is also helping her come to terms with aging and the changes that it can bring: “Losing the weight helps me feel better. I feel like I have 20 pounds to go, but that’s because I’m comparing myself to Jessica in 1995. I have to remind myself that I’m not going to look like I did when I was 16. I’m almost 50, and I need to put my expectations in perspective.”
Fitness
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While exercise is known to improve memory, scientists have mostly studied this effect by using behavioral tests or brain imaging methods like MRIs, says Michelle Voss, PhD, one of the study’s authors, a professor, and the director of the Health, Brain, and Cognitive Lab at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
But she says these approaches can’t precisely identify where “ripples” originate, particularly in the deep brain structures like the hippocampus, a part of the brain strongly connected to memory and learning, she says.
The current study, published in Brain Communications, recorded electrical activity directly, using surgically implanted (intracranial) electrodes. “This allowed us to observe how exercise changes the brain’s memory circuits in real time,” Dr. Voss says.
20-Minute Bursts of Exercise Increase Brain Ripples
The participants performed a 5-minute warm-up and then rode a stationary bike for 20 minutes at a pace they could maintain. Researchers recorded their brain activity before and after the biking session.
The electrodes showed an increased rate of so-called sharp-wave ripples from the hippocampus and connections with cortical regions of the brain, which are involved in learning and memory.
“Sharp-wave ripples have long been known from animal studies to play a central role in memory,” Voss says, adding that recent studies using intracranial recordings in humans also support the importance of ripples for human memory.
“Our findings are the first to show that exercise can modulate these ripple signals in the human brain,” she says.
Researchers also observed that larger increases in heart rate during exercise were associated with larger changes in ripple activity in cortical networks, Voss adds.
What’s Already Known About Exercise, Memory, and Learning
Exercise helps build connections between neurons, which deepens and strengthens brain networks, Franssen says.
Physical activity also improves metabolism, which improves insulin sensitivity, helping blood sugar regulation and giving the brain a “more stable and reliable supply of fuel,” Dr. Perlmutter says.
“This is critically important because the brain is an energy-intensive organ, consuming roughly 20 percent of the body’s energy despite representing only a small fraction of body weight,” he adds.
The Research Has Limitations
Voss says researchers were careful to “exclude signals that contained epileptic activity. However, of course, we can’t statistically control for the accumulated effects of having epilepsy on the brain.”
The exercise-brain ripple patterns observed in the current study also closely match those observed in healthy adults using noninvasive brain imaging, such as MRI, she added.
“That convergence across very different methods is one of the strongest indicators that the effects are not specific to epilepsy, but reflect a more general human brain response to exercise,” Voss said.
Researchers also didn’t directly test memory performance, Voss notes. “While hippocampal ripples are strongly linked to memory processing in decades of neuroscience research, the next step will be to measure how exercise-related changes in ripples relate to memory performance in the same individuals.”
Future studies should also compare exercise with other everyday activities, such as sitting quietly or light movement, to determine how specific these effects are to aerobic exercise at the intensity that was studied, she says.
Satisfy Your Brain’s Exercise Craving
It’s never too early or too late to start exercising for brain health, Franssen says.
People of any age, from grade-school children to people in their nineties, can benefit from increased physical activity, Perlmutter says. “My recommendation is to consider taking advantage of the connection between physical activity and brain health across the entire range of human aging.”
Any type of exercise is great, Franssen says, but especially “repetitive behaviors,” like swimming, jogging, and walking.
“Sometimes we let the hugeness of putting in a huge fitness routine get in our way,” she says. “Having a little exercise snack every so often is also very important to improving cognition.”
Increasing our level of physical fitness leads to a bigger release of brain-boosting proteins following one session of exercise, a new study led by a UCL researcher has found.
The study, published in Brain Research, took a group of inactive unfit participants through a 12-week training programme of cycling three times per week and made them fitter. Researchers found as their fitness increased, so did the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) released following exercise, resulting in improved brain function.
Just 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise releases BDNF, a brain protein which is known to support the formation of new neurons and new synapses (connections between brain cells), and maintains the health of existing neurons. This is the first study to show that for unfit people, just 12 weeks of consistent training can boost the brain’s response to a single 15-minute workout.
The study, led by Dr Flaminia Ronca (UCL Surgery & Interventional Science, and the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health), involved 30 participants – 23 male and seven female – taking part in the 12-week programme. To assess fitness levels throughout the programme, participants completed VO2max tests every six weeks, which measures the maximum rate of oxygen your body can consume and use during intense exercise.
BDNF levels were measured pre- and post-VO2max testing, alongside a series of cognitive and memory tests, while also measuring changes in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex – where executive functions such as decision-making, emotion regulation, attention and impulsivity are controlled.
By the final week of the trial, results showed that baseline levels of BDNF did not change, but participants did show a larger spike of BDNF following intense exercise, compared to how their brains responded to intense exercise before the 12-week programme. This was linked to improvements in VO2max (aerobic fitness).
Higher overall BDNF levels and stronger exercise-induced increases were also associated with changes in activity across key areas of the prefrontal cortex during attention and inhibition tasks, though not during memory tasks.
Overall, the results showed that increasing physical fitness can enhance the brain’s ability to produce BDNF in response to acute bouts of exercise, which can have a strong positive influence on neural activity.
Lead author Dr Flaminia Ronca said: “We’ve known for a while that exercise is good for our brain, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are still being disentangled. The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks.”
Notes to editors:
For more information or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact: Tom Cramp, UCL Media Relations , T: +447586 711698, E: [email protected]
The research paper: ‘BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise’, Flaminia Ronca, Cian Xu, Ellen Kong, Dennis Chan, Antonia Hamilton, Giampietro Schiavo, Ilias Tachtsidis, Paola Pinti, Benjamin Tari, Tom Gurney, Paul W. Burgess, is published in Brain Research, March 2026,
About UCL (University College London)
UCL is a diverse global community of world-class academics, students, industry links, external partners, and alumni. Our powerful collective of individuals and institutions work together to explore new possibilities.
Since 1826, we have championed independent thought by attracting and nurturing the world’s best minds. Our community of more than 50,000 students from 150 countries and over 16,000 staff pursues academic excellence, breaks boundaries and makes a positive impact on real world problems.
We are consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and are one of only a handful of institutions rated as having the strongest academic reputation and the broadest research impact.
We have a progressive and integrated approach to our teaching and research – championing innovation, creativity and cross-disciplinary working. We teach our students how to think, not what to think, and see them as partners, collaborators and contributors.
For 200 years, we are proud to have opened higher education to students from a wide range of backgrounds and to change the way we create and share knowledge.
We were the first in England to welcome women to university education and that courageous attitude and disruptive spirit is still alive today. We are UCL.
www.ucl.ac.uk | Read news at www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ | Follow UCL News on Bluesky and LinkedIn
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Media Contact
Tom Cramp
University College London
[email protected]
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Journal
Brain Research
DOI
10.1016/j.brainres.2026.150253
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
BDNF relates to prefrontal cortex activity in the context of physical exercise
Article Publication Date
4-Mar-2026
Tags
/Health and medicine/Human health/Physical exercise
bu içeriği en az 2000 kelime olacak şekilde ve alt başlıklar ve madde içermiyecek şekilde ünlü bir science magazine için İngilizce olarak yeniden yaz. Teknik açıklamalar içersin ve viral olacak şekilde İngilizce yaz. Haber dışında başka bir şey içermesin. Haber içerisinde en az 12 paragraf ve her bir paragrafta da en az 50 kelime olsun. Cevapta sadece haber olsun. Ayrıca haberi yazdıktan sonra içerikten yararlanarak aşağıdaki başlıkların bilgisi var ise haberin altında doldur. Eğer yoksa bilgisi ilgili kısmı yazma.:
Subject of Research:
Article Title:
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Keywords
Tags: 12-week cycling training program benefitsbrain plasticity and physical fitnessbrain-derived neurotrophic factor after exerciseeffects of aerobic exercise on BDNFexercise and neuron healthexercise-induced neurogenesisfitness level impact on brain proteinsfitness training for cognitive improvementimproving brain function through fitnessmoderate to vigorous aerobic exercise effectsphysical fitness and brain healthVO2max and brain function correlation
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