Weight Loss Articles

Being overweight is one of these subjects that everybody has been talking about for the past few years. It has been becoming gradually worse for the past twenty years, but we seem to just now be realizing this. The country with the highest obesity ratio on the earth is the United States. The amount of overweight children and adults has doubled in the past 25 years. In 2004, seventeen percent of all kids were overweight and nearly a third of the total adults over 20 were obese. This means the amount of people who are chancing their health by being too fat goes in the millions. The amount of unhealthy people continues to rise in America and other developed nations and is now one of the largest health threats in the country. The country is huge; how did this happen? This overall increase in size has many contributing environmental factors and unfortunately they are now considered the American way of life.

Americans started to change their daily activities and that made them more sedentary in the 1980's. The biggest impact was the eating habits. Food that used to be eaten at home and cooked by the women are now more often consumed in restaurants and quick service chains. Due to competition, restaurants now have portion sizes that double or even triple the portions back in the early fast food days. 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 last few years, but a cheeseburger served in Most of today's most popular restaurants could be over two times the size of a McDonald's hamburger, with an amount of fries to match this unhealthy meal. Only one of these super-sized meals can be somebody's entire day's necessary calories.

The amount of over weight people has also grown because of American affluence. As people in developed nations acquire more and more wealth, the need or concern to save is diminished steadily. Families that a few of decades ago might have been more controlled on food choices because of a families income today are given wider and bigger choices in what they choose to eat. Kids now get their first eating experiences consuming rich, high calorie restaurant foods with their parents. Our country produces nearly triple the food than we eat, so the majority of people don't think about where or how the meal is prepared and go based on food cravings.

Most of us have a lazy life, another major cause of the weight problem. Nowadays, even if it is a very short distance, many of us will drive our cars. Busy lifestyles and hectic work schedules cause it to be hard for many people to allocate the time to exercise. As technology has advanced most jobs are getting less physically active. This Causes people who come home from work and relax because they are worn out from their job will get small amounts of physical activity throughout.

Obesity is calculated with a body mass index, or BMI. The risk for having bad health conditions goes up as a person's BMI raises. 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 overweight is 2 times as likely to suffer a fatal health problem early than an average person. Currently, obesity kills an estimated 112,000 Americans a year. The risk of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver disease, and diabetes are just some of the possible ailments that come along with being overweight. There are also many of non-deadly conditions like depression, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and swollen legs.

The weight problem affects you whether you're overweight or not. An estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year is what Americans are spending in air fares due to increased fuel costs to haul the added weight and lawsuits to make larger passenger seats brought on by obese plaintiffs. A yearly total of 78,500,000,000 dollars is the cost of treating the number of health conditions brought on by obesity, as it makes up nearly 10% of all medical expenditures. Litigation with obese people became so common, the government even tried to make laws protecting food makers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.