Forget heart rate monitors and body fat measurements. The best gauge of fitness may be a tidy house.

NiCole Keith, an associate professor of physical education at Indiana University, set out to examine how physical activity is influenced by a range of factors for city-dwellers. Her study involved 998 people aged 49 to 65 living in St. Louis. She looked at the condition of sidewalks, the presence of outdoor lighting, and other environmental characteristics believed to affect an individual’s decision to be active. The result, she says “was not at all what we expected.” The interior condition of people’s houses turned out to be the only factor linked to their level of physical activity.

Got milk? Researchers find that exercisers who drink milk after a resistance workout are more likely to gain muscle and lose fat.

For the study, a team at Canada’s McMaster University asked one group of women to drink a tall glass of nonfat milk immediately after doing a resistance workout and then another glass an hour later. A second group of women drank a look-a-like sugar-based energy drink after their strength-building workout.

Twelve weeks later, the milk drinkers showed better changes in body composition than the non-milk drinkers.

House-hunting? Try walking around the neighborhood before you sign on the dotted line.

A rosy complexion really does spell good health, according to a clever experiment conducted by researchers at the University of St. Andrews. The results offer one more good reason to get fit.

Here’s a new way to shed fat: bet money on it. Thanks to several new websites that enable people to make bets and track their progress, hopeful weight losers are competing against one another to see who can lose the most weight.

What’s the best remedy for an aching back? According to results from a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health, most chronic back pain sufferers don’t know the answer–in large part because their doctors aren’t telling them.

Are physically active women less likely to develop breast cancer? The latest evidence says yes. And new findings also suggest who’s most likely to benefit.

Take a stroll in the morning or the early evening in the Brazilian city of Recife, and chances are you’ll see lots of people exercising. U.S. health experts say Brazil’s fifth-largest city has found just the recipe for encouraging good health and fitness.

For years the nation’s expanding girth has been blamed on lazy lifestyles. If more of us would just get off the couch and get moving, the thinking goes, we wouldn’t have to worry about weight loss plans and diet books. New evidence paints a more complicated picture.

I’m not fat. I’ve never had to diet. Except for the odd foray into cross-dressing on Halloween in San Francisco’s Castro district, I’ve never worried about slipping into a size 8 evening dress. And I’m not a fan of graphic novels or books. But as soon as I picked up The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, A Memoir, by Carol Lay (Villard Books, 2008), I was charmed.