Weight Loss Articles

Being overweight is one of these issues that we have all been hearing about for the last couple years. Things have been becoming steadily worse for the past twenty years, but we are just realizing it. The U.S. has the most elevated obesity rate in the developed world. The number of fat adolescents and adults has doubled in the last twenty-five years. As of 2004, 17% of the total kids were overweight and nearly a third of the total adults over 20 were obese. This basicallymeans that millions are too big and risking their health. The prevalence of obesity continues to go up in America and is now one of the largest health problems in the country. The country is huge; how did this happen? Many environmental factors that are now very commonplace are thought to be the causes of this general increased weight.

Americans started to change their daily activities and that made them more sedentary in the 1980's. Eating habits was the primary thing. Meals that at one time was eaten at home and cooked by the homemaker are now more and more often consumed in restaurants and quick service chains. Fast food portions that were common in earlier years are two to three times bigger in today's competitive restaurants. Fast food restaurants like the McDonald's restaurant have have had a lot of criticizing for their super sizing high calorie sodas and french fries in the past, but a meal served in Most of today's most popular restaurants could be over double the size of a McDonald's hamburger, with an amount of fries to match this unhealthy meal. Just one of these extra large meals can be somebody's entire day's required calories.

Many Americans have an inactive life, another major factor of the weight problem. Most adults own cars and use them to get everywhere they go, even if it is a very short distance. Busy lifestyles and hectic work hours cause it to be difficult for many of us to allocate the time to exercise. As technology has become more available more jobs are getting less physical. So now people who come home from work and relax because they are tired from their job will get little or no physical activity all day long.

Obesity affects you whether you're in those demographics or not. In the airline industry, lawsuits to widen passenger seats that are brought against airlines by overweight people and the added fuel that it takes to haul all this extra weight is now costing us an estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year . In the medical field, health conditions caused by the weight problem now make up almost 10% of all medical expenditures with a yearly cost of 78,500,000,000 dollars. Litigation with obese clients became so common, the government even tried to create laws protecting food producers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.

Wealth and abundance is another big reason that appears to link to obesity. As people in wealthy countries get more and more money, the requirement or worry to save is lowered steadily. Bigger and more varied options are now offered to kids as opposed to a generation or two ago when a family's budget could limit this. Children now get their earliest eating experiences consuming rich, unhealthy restaurant foods with their parents. More of us are not concerned in where our meals come from but concentrate more on our personal desires in a society that produces almost three times what it's whole population eats.

Obesity is calculated with a body mass index, or BMI. The higher the BMI, the more likely the person is to be in poor health. 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+. An average human has half the risk of suffering a deadly medical issue than an obese person who is 40% overweight. Today, obesity kills an estimated 112,000 Americans a year. Just a few of the possible conditions that come along with being obese are; cancer, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, and liver disease. There are also many of non-deadly conditions like depression, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and swollen legs.