Obese with strong heart beats thin and weak

Not exactly.

"You are better off if you are fit, and you are better off if you have a shorter belt," said Eric Ravussin, an obesity expert at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA.

That is the real takeaway message.

Patients who were fit and relatively thin had the lowest odds of dying in the study period and constituted a "control" group. Fit but overweight patients were about twice as likely to die, while those who were fit but obese had three times the risk of death compared to the fit and thin control group.

Things got more complicated for the unfit. Patients with poor fitness scores who were overweight were nearly 7 times more likely to die during the study compared to the control group. But normal-weight people who were unfit were nearly 10 times more likely to die, the researchers found.

So get fit.

But to do that, you must do it the right way.