Weight Loss Articles

These past few years, everyone has been hearing about the consequences of obesity. It seems that all of a sudden everybody woke up one day to find a stack of pancakes in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other. The nation with the greatest obesity ratio in the world is the United States. The number of obese children and grown-ups has doubled in the past quarter century. As of 2004, nearly one fifth of all kids were obese and 32% of all adults past 20 were obese. This basicallymeans that millions are obese and risking their health. The amount of unhealthy people continues to go up in America and is now one of the biggest health threats in the country. The country is huge; how did this happen? Many environmental factors that are now an American way of life are believed to be the causes of this general increased weight.

During the 1980's, Americans began to have several factors of daily activity change to make for a less active lifestyle. Eating habits was the first thing. Food that at one time was eaten at home and prepared by the women are now more and more often consumed in restaurants and quick service chains. Due to competition, restaurants now have portion sizes that amount to three times that of the portions back in the early fast food days. A cheeseburger in many of today's favorite sit-down restaurants can be two to three times the size of a McDonald's hamburger, even though the popular restaurant has been blamed as the cause for America's obesity problem. Only one of these super-sized meals can be a person's entire day's necessary calories.

Wealth and abundance is another major reason that seems to link to the weight problem. The need to conserve goods and foods goes away gradually as people in developed nations acquire more and more wealth. Kids that a few of years ago might have been more limited on food choices due to a families budget today are allowed more options in what they choose to eat. With parents that eat out all the time due to excess income allows them to show their kids form their earliest age bad eating habits with rich, unhealthy restaurant foods. The U.S. produces close to 3times more food than we consume, so most citizens don't think about where or how their meal is prepared and go more by food cravings.

Many of us have an inactive lifestyle, another major cause of obesity. Most adults own automobiles and drive them to travel anywhere they go, even if it is a very short distance. Busy lifestyles and hectic work schedules make it hard for many of us to allocate the time to exercise. As technology has advanced most jobs are becoming less physically active. So now Americans who come home from work and rest because they are tired from their job will get little or no physical activity all day long.

Whether obese or not, you are still being affected by the rising obesity rate. In the airplane industry, lawsuits to make larger passenger seats that are started against airlines by overweight customers and the added fuel that it requires to haul all this extra weight is now costing us an estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year . An annual total of 78,500,000,000 dollars is the cost of treating the number of health conditions started because of obesity, as it creates nearly 10% of all medical costs. The cheeseburger bill of 2004 was introduced by lawmakers to try to offer a little safeguard for food producers after lawsuits with obese plaintiffs became so common.

BMI, or body mass index is what is used to measure obesity. The risk for getting bad health conditions 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 normal person has half the risk of suffering a deadly health problem than an overweight individual who is 40% overweight. 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 being overweight. Swollen legs, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and depression are just some examples of problems with obesity that are not fatal but could rapidly turn into that.