Weight Loss Articles

Obesity is one of those subjects that everybody has been talking about for the past couple years. It seems that all of a sudden everyone woke up one day and found a stack of pancakes in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other. The country with the highest obesity ratio in the world is the U.S.. The number of fat adolescents and adults has doubled in the last quarter century. In 2004, nearly one fifth of the total children were overweight and thirty-two percent of all adults over 20 were obese. This basicallymeans that millions are too big and risking their health. It is now considered one of the largest health threats in the country as the prevalence of over weight americans continues to rise. What happened to make us all so big? This overall gain in weight has many contributing environmental factors that are now thought of as the American way of life.

Americans started to change their daily activities and that made them less active in the 1980's. The first was the eating habits. Food that at one time was eaten at home and cooked by the homemaker are now more and more often consumed in restaurants and fast food chains. Fast food portions that were common in earlier years are two to three times larger in today's competitive restaurants. Fast food restaurants like the McDonald's chain have come under serious fire for their extra large high calorie sodas and french fries in the past, but a cheeseburger available in many of today's most common restaurants may be over two times the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, with a portion of fries to match this enormity. Just one of these extra large meals can be a person's entire day's necessary calories.

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

The amount of over weight people has also escalated because of American affluence. As people in wealthy countries get more and more wealth, the need or worry to conserve is diminished gradually. Families that a few of generations ago could have been more limited on food selections due to a families budget today are given more choices in what they choose to eat. Kids now get their first eating lessons eating rich, unhealthy restaurant foods with their parents. The U.S. produces close to triple the food than we eat, so the majority of people don't care where or how their meal is prepared and decide from cravings.

BMI, or body mass index is what is used to measure obesity. The higher the BMI, the more likely someone is to have serious health issues. 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 obese is twice as likely to have a life threatening medical problem prematurely than an average person. Currently, obesity is responsible for the deaths of an estimated 112,000 Americans a year. Only some of the possible conditions that come along with being obese are; cancer, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, and liver disease. There are also a number of non-deadly ailments like depression, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and swollen legs.

One other huge factor of obesity is the sedentary life that many Americans live. Most people have vehicles and drive them to get everywhere they go, even if we could walk. Many of us have difficulty finding the time to exercise due to the busy lifestyles or hectic work days. As technology has advanced more jobs are getting less physically active. Because many Americans will work at the office on a computer everyday and not have any physical exercise all day because they are exhausted from their job.