Weight Loss Articles

In the last couple of years, everybody has been learning more about the results of obesity. It seems that suddenly everybody woke up one morning and found a stack of pancakes in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other. The United States has the most elevated obesity ratio in the developed world. The amount of overweight adolescents and grown-ups has grown by 100% in the past twenty-five years. thirty-two percent of the total adults past 20 and 17% of the total kids were obese as of 2004. This means that millions are too fat and endangering their health. The rate of obesity continues to escalate in America and other developed nations and is considered one of the largest health problems in the country. What happened to make us all so big? This general increase in size has many contributing environmental factors that are now considered the American way of life.

Americans began to change factors of daily activity that made them more sedentary in the 1980's. Eating habits was the primary problem. Meals that used to be eaten at home and cooked by the women are now more and more often consumed in restaurants and fast food chains. Due to competition, eating establishments now have portion sizes that double or even triple the ones back in the early fast food days. A cheeseburger in many of our favorite sit-down restaurants can be two to three times the size of a McDonald's Big Mac, even though the popular chain has been blamed as the cause for our weight problem. Just one of these super-sized meals can be a person's entire day's required calories.

Obesity has also grown due to American affluence. The need to save goods and foods goes away gradually as people in wealthy nations get more and more wealth. Families that a couple of decades ago could have been more controlled on food selections due to a families budget today are given wider and bigger options in what they partake in. With parents that eat out constantly because excess income enables them to show their children early in poor eating habits with rich, high calorie restaurant foods. More Americans are less concerned about where our food comes from but focus mainly on our personal cravings in a country that produces almost triple what it's entire population consumes.

BMI, or body mass index is what is used to measure 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 normal human has half the risk of suffering a life threatening medical issue than an obese person who is 40% overweight. Obesity causes the death of an estimated 112,000 Americans per year. Only some of the possible conditions that are associated with being overweight are; cancer, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, and liver disease. Swollen legs, loss of bowel control, breathing problems, and depression are just a few examples of problems with obesity that are not life threatening but are able rapidly turn into that.

Whether obese or not, you are still being affected by the growing obesity rate. In the airplane industry, lawsuits to widen passenger seats that are started against airlines by overweight people and the added fuel that it requires to move all this extra weight is now costing Americans an estimated 275,000,000 dollars a year now in increased air fares. In the medical field, health issues 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 overweight people became so prevalent, the government even tried to make laws protecting food makers with the Cheeseburger bill of 2004.

One other huge factor of obesity is the lazy lifestyle that many Americans live. Most adults own cars and drive them to travel anywhere they go, even if we could walk. Overloaded lifestyles and hectic work schedules make it difficult for many people to find the time to exercise. Most jobs are now less physically demanding as technology has advanced. Because most Americans will work somewhere on a computer everyday and do nothing active all day because they are tired from their job.