Weight Loss Articles

Obesity is one of those issues that we have all been hearing about for the last couple years. It seems that all of a sudden everyone woke up one morning and found a stack of pancakes in one hand and a bacon burger in the other. The nation with the greatest obesity ratio on the earth is America. The amount of overweight adolescents and adults has doubled in the last 25 years. 32% of all adults over 20 and seventeen percent of the total kids were obese in 2004. This means the number of people who are chancing their health by being obese ranges in the millions. It is now thought of as one of the greatest health hazards in the country as the prevalence of obesity continues to get out of control. What happened to make us all so big? Many environmental factors that are now an American way of life are blamed to be the causes of this general increased weight.

Americans started to change their daily activities and that made them less active in the 1980's. Eating habits was the primary problem. Food that used to be consumed at home and cooked by the women are now more and more often eaten in restaurants and fast food chains. Due to competition, eating establishments now have portion sizes that amount to three times that of the ones back in the 60's. Fast food chains like the McDonald's restaurant have have had a lot of criticizing for their extra large high calorie sodas and french fries in the past, but a cheeseburger served in Most of today's most common restaurants could be over two times the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, with an amount of fries to match this enormity. People that are accustomed to consuming everything on their plates can sit down and get their full amount of calories in one sitting with one of these super sized meals.

The amount of over weight people has also escalated because of American affluence. As citizens in developed countries get more and more wealth, the requirement or concern to save is lowered gradually. Families that a couple of generations ago would have been more controlled on food choices because of a families income nowadays are given more options in what they partake in. Kids now get their first eating habits consuming rich, high calorie restaurant foods with their parents. More Americans are not concerned about where our meals come from and concentrate mainly on our personal desires in a country that produces nearly triple what it's entire population eats.

One other huge factor of being over weight is the lazy life that most Americans live. More adults have vehicles and drive them to travel everywhere they go, even if it is a very short distance. Crazy lifestyles and hectic work schedules make it hard for most people to allocate the time to work out. As technology has advanced most jobs are becoming less physically active. This Causes Americans who come home from work and rest because they are tired from their job will get small amounts of physical exercise all day long.

Obesity is calculated with a body mass index, or BMI. The risk for getting bad health problems raises as a person's BMI gets higher. There are three levels of obesity; mild obesity with a BMI of 30+, morbid obesity at BMI 40+, and malignant obesity with a BMI of 50+. A person that is forty percent obese is twice as likely to suffer a fatal health problem early than an average person. Currently, obesity is responsible for the deaths of an estimated 112,000 Americans a year. The risk of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver disease, and diabetes are just a couple of the possible conditions that come along with obesity. Swollen legs, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and depression are just some examples of symptoms of obesity that are not life threatening but could quickly develop into that.

The weight problem affects you whether you're overweight or not. An estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year is what we are paying extra in air fares because of increased fuel charges to haul the extra weight and lawsuits to make larger passenger seats brought on by obese plaintiffs. In the medical field, health issues caused by the weight problem now create nearly 10% of all medical expenditures with a yearly cost of 78,500,000,000 dollars. Litigation with overweight people became so common, the government attempted to make laws protecting food makers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.