Exercise more important than weight loss for heart disease patients. A study conducted by Norwegian researchers and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology followed 3,307 heart disease patients for about 16 years each, making it a fairly large study of its kind. To their surprise, people with coronary heart disease who lost weight did not see a prolonged life expectancy. On the other hand, patients who did about 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week saw a 19 percent lower risk of death, and a 36 percent reduction if they did more exercise than that. Furthermore, all of the heart disease patients of normal weight who lost weight in an attempt to remedy their condition actually increased their rate of mortality. This was an observational study, meaning that extraneous variables such as how sick exactly each patient was at the beginning were not accounted for, but the size of the study and the significance of the numbers associated suggest that being active is the most important step one can take in reducing mortality while living with a heart disease.