Weight Loss Articles

In the last couple of years, everyone has been learning more about the effects of obesity. Things have been becoming progressively worse for the past two decades, but we seem to just now be realizing it. The United States has the highest obesity rate in the developed world. In the last twenty-five years the number of obese adults and adolescents have risen by 100%. Nearly a third of all adults past 20 and 17% of the total kids were overweight in 2004. This means the amount of people who are endangering their health by being too big ranges in the millions. The prevalence of obesity continues to escalate in America and is now one of the largest 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 blamed to be the causes of this general increased girth.

Americans began to change their daily activities and that made them less active in the 1980's. The first was the eating habits. Food that used to be consumed at home and prepared by the women are now more and more often eaten in restaurants and quick service chains. Due to competition, eating establishments now have portion sizes that double or even triple the ones back in the 60's. A cheeseburger in many of today's favorite sit-down restaurants can be two to three times the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, even though the popular restaurant has been blamed as the cause for America's obesity problem. 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.

Many Americans have an inactive lifestyle, another major cause of the weight problem. More of us own vehicles and use them to get anywhere they go, even if we could walk. Most people have difficulty finding the time to work out due to the busy lifestyles or crazy work days. More jobs are now less active as technology has advanced. Because most Americans will work somewhere on a computer everyday and not have any physical activities all day because they are tired from work.

BMI, or body mass index is what we use to calculate obesity. The risk for having bad health problems raises as a person's BMI raises. 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+. An average human has half the risk of suffering a life threatening medical issue than an overweight person who is 40% overweight. Today, obesity kills 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. Swollen legs, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and depression are just some examples of problems with obesity that are not life threatening but are able rapidly turn into that.

The weight problem affects you whether you're overweight or not. In the airline business, lawsuits to make larger passenger seats that are brought against airlines by obese customers and the added fuel that is required to haul all this extra weight is now costing us an estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year now in increased air fares. An annual total of 78,500,000,000 dollars is the price of treating the number of health complications brought on by obesity, as it makes up nearly 10% of all medical costs. Litigation with overweight people became so prevalent, the government attempted to make laws protecting food producers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.

Affluence is another big factor that appears to link to obesity. As citizens in developed nations acquire more and more money, the need or worry to save is diminished gradually. Bigger and more different options are now offered to children as opposed to a generation or two back when a family's income could control this. Children now get their earliest eating experiences consuming rich, unhealthy restaurant foods with their parents. More of us are less concerned in where our meals come from but concentrate mainly on our personal desires in a society that makes almost triple what it's entire population eats.