Lifestyle changes translate into better numbers on the scale or blood pressure cuff, but what’s too often overlooked is they make people happier with their overall health as well, a new study shows.

That’s what researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health demonstrated in a recent analysis that showed participants in a community-based behavioral lifestyle intervention program not only lost weight and exercised more, but they also increased their health-related quality of life by an average of nearly 10 percent.

The research team investigated the impact of the Group Lifestyle Balance program, is a 22-session program administered over a one-year period aimed at helping people make lifestyle changes to improve their risk for diabetes and heart disease.

A total of 223 participants were enrolled to test the effectiveness of the Group Lifestyle Balance program at a worksite and three community centers in the Pittsburgh area. The participants averaged 58 years of age and had pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome or both. Metabolic syndrome is a constellation of conditions that sharply hikes the risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Before beginning the program, each participant ranked his or her current health on a scale from 0 "worst imaginable health state" to 100 "best imaginable health state." The U.S. average is 79.2, whereas the participants averaged 71.5 at baseline.

Once scores were adjusted for meeting weight loss and physical activity goals, participants who met the program goals were found to have increased their health-related quality-of-life score by nine more points compared to those participants who met neither program goal.

“It is exciting that we were able to document an improvement in health-related quality of life in addition to improvement in risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease," says Andrea Kriska, the senior author. “This important benefit was most evident in those who started the intervention program having a relatively lower quality of life--in other words, those who needed to improve the most,” she added of the analysis, which appears in Quality of Life Research.