Weight Loss Articles

In the past few years, everybody has been hearing about the effects of being overweight. It seems that suddenly we all woke up one morning to find a stack of pancakes in one hand and a bacon burger in the other. The nation with the greatest obesity rate in the world is America. The amount of obese adolescents and adults has grown by 100% in the last 25 years. In 2004, seventeen percent of the total children were obese and thirty-two percent of all adults over 20 were obese. This basicallymeans that millions are overweight and endangering their health. The amount of unhealthy people continues to rise in America as well as other places and is considered one of the biggest health threats in the country. The country is huge; how did this happen? This overall increase in size has many contributing environmental factors that are now thought of as the American way of life.

During the 1980's, Americans began to have several factors of daily activity change to make for a less active lifestyle. The first was the eating habits. Food that used to be eaten at home and prepared by the women are now more often consumed in restaurants and fast food chains. Fast food portions that were standard in earlier years are 2-3 times bigger in today's competitive restaurants. A cheeseburger in many of today's most popular sit-down restaurants can be double or triple the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, even though the popular chain has been blamed as the cause for America's weight problem. Those of us that are used to consuming everything on their plates can sit down and get their full amount of calories in one sitting with one of these combos.

Whether obese or not, you are still affected by the growing obesity rate. An estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year is what Americans are spending in air fares due to increased fuel costs to make up for the extra weight and lawsuits to make larger passenger seats started by obese people. In the medical field, health issues created by obesity now create 10% of all medical expenditures with an annual cost of 78,500,000,000 dollars. Litigation with overweight plaintiffs became so prevalent, the government attempted to make laws protecting food makers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.

Wealth and abundance is another big factor that appears to link to the weight problem. As people in wealthy countries acquire more and more wealth, the requirement or concern to conserve is lowered gradually. Bigger and more varied choices are now offered to kids compared a generation or two ago when a family's income could limit this. With parents that eat out all the time due to disposable income enables them to show their kids early in poor eating habits with rich, unhealthy restaurant foods. More of us are not concerned about where our food comes from and focus more on our personal desires in a country that makes nearly triple what it's entire population consumes.

Most of us live an inactive lifestyle, another major cause of obesity. Today, even if it is a very short distance, most Americans will take our cars. Crazy lifestyles and hectic work hours make it hard for many people to allocate the time to work out. Most jobs are now less physically demanding as technology has advanced. Because most Americans will work somewhere on a computer everyday and not have any physical activities all day because they are exhausted from work.

BMI, or body mass index is what we use to measure obesity. The higher the BMI, the more likely the person is to be in poor health. The three main levels of obesity are 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 overweight is two times as likely to have a life threatening health problem early than an average person. Today, 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 few of the possible ailments that are associated with being overweight. Swollen legs, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and depression are just a few examples of problems with obesity that are not fatal but are able quickly develop into that.