Weight Loss Articles

These last few years, everyone has been hearing more about the effects of being overweight. It seems that suddenly everyone woke up one morning to find a milkshake in one hand and a bacon burger in the other. The country with the highest obesity rate on the earth is the U.S.. In the last 25 years the number of overweight grown-ups and adolescents have doubled. thirty-two percent of the total adults past 20 and seventeen percent of the total children were overweight as of 2004. Basically the number of people who are endangering their health by being too fat goes in the millions. The amount of unhealthy people continues to go up in America as well as other places and is now one of the largest health problems in the country. What happened to make us all so big? Many environmental factors that are now very commonplace are blamed to be the causes of this general increased girth.

Americans started to change their daily activities and that made them less active in the 1980's. Eating habits was the first thing. Restaurants and fast food chains started to be the most popular places for family dinner no longer at the home prepared the traditional way. Due to competition, eating establishments now have portion sizes that double or even triple the portions back in the early fast food days. Fast food restaurants like the McDonald's restaurant have come under serious fire 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 common restaurants may be over two times the size of a McDonald's hamburger, with a side of fries to match this enormity. Those of us that are used to consuming the entire contents of their plates can get their daily amount of calories in one sitting with one of these meals.

One other major reason for obesity is the lazy lifestyle that most of us live. Today, even if it is an easy walk, many of us will take our vehicles. Busy lifestyles and hectic work hours make it difficult for most people to find the time to work out. As technology has advanced more jobs are becoming less physical. So now many Americans will work at the office on a computer all day and do nothing active all day because they are tired from work.

Obesity has also escalated due to American affluence. As citizens in developed countries acquire more and more money, the need or worry to conserve is diminished gradually. Bigger and more different choices are now offered to children compared a generation or two back when a family's budget could limit this. Kids now get their earliest eating lessons eating rich, high calorie restaurant foods with their parents. The U.S. Makes almost triple the food than U.S. residents eat, so the majority of people don't care where or how their food is prepared and go based on food cravings.

BMI, or body mass index is what is used to calculate 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 obese is 2 times as likely to have a life threatening medical problem prematurely than a normal person. Obesity kills an estimated 112,000 people in this country per year. Only some of the possible ailments that come along with being overweight 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.

The weight problem affects you whether you're in those demographics or not. An estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year is what we are paying extra in air fares because of increased fuel charges to make up for the added weight and lawsuits to widen passenger seats started by overweight people. In the medical field, health problems caused by obesity now make up nearly 10% of all medical expenditures with a yearly cost of 78,500,000,000 dollars. Litigation with obese people became so common, the government attempted to create laws protecting food producers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.