The Obesity Factor: How Controlling Your Weight Helps You Control Your Health
According to medical experts, even losing just a little bit of weight can go a long way toward improving your health. In fact, studies have shown obesity to be linked to a multitude of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Medically, the most reliable way to evaluate body fat is to measure height and weight, and then calculate body mass index (BMI). Doctors are also looking more and more at waist circumference as well, since weight carried in the stomach area has a particularly negative impact on health.
How Obesity Affects Health
Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is critical for overall health, as being overweight or obese puts you at higher risk for developing serious health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, gallstones, a variety of respiratory issues, and certain cancers. In addition, there is a direct relationship between BMI (body mass index) and risk, with the higher the BMI, the higher the likelihood of disease.
Links have even been found between weight and depression, with a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry citing that obese people have a 55 percent higher risk of developing depression over time compared with people of normal weight. Even more notable, recent studies have found a correlation between weight and lifespan, with excess weight in some cases cutting many years off a person’s life.
Tips for Long Term Weight Loss
Crash diets simply don’t work, as in most cases the diet can’t be maintained over the long term and so the weight just comes back. Many factors contribute to a person’s weight including environment, family history and genetics, metabolism, and behavior and habits. For successful long term weight loss, you will need to change those behaviors and habits. Here are some tips for sustainable weight loss:
- Follow a healthy eating plan: Studies have shown for years that a balanced diet with plenty of lean proteins, fresh fruits and vegetables, and whole grains is the best way to take weight off and keep it off. It’s generally recommended that you reduce your daily intake by 500 calories for weight loss.
- Watch your portion sizes: Energy balance is one of the most important parts of maintaining a healthy weight. Basically, you want to balance the amount of energy or calories you are taking in from food and drinks with the energy that goes out with physical exercises and basic things like breathing and digestion. For weight loss, you want more energy to be going out than coming in over time.
- Stay physically active: When you exercise regularly and do simple things like take the stairs rather than the elevator, this will help you increase the amount of energy that’s going out and thus facilitate weight loss. Along with this, it’s also important that you limit the time you spend being physically inactive.
Remember that research has shown that your health can be greatly improved with a loss of even 5 to 10 percent of your starting weight. Consult with your physician to determine whether implementing a weight loss plan would be beneficial to your overall health.