You Don’t Need it: How Extra Weight Affects Your Body

According to the WHO research, 39% of men and 40% of women have extra weight, and 13% are diagnosed with obesity. After 1975, the last figure has grown almost twice. Let’s see what is extra weight, what problems it can cause, and whether everyone can benefit from the principle of move more, eat less.

How to Evaluate Your Weight and When to Worry

Start from calculating the body mass ratio. To do this, you need to divide your weight in kilograms by the square of your height in meters (kg/m2). If the resulting figure is within the limits of 18.5-24.9 kg/m2, then your weight is within the normal range. According to WHO experts, the risks to health occur when body mass ratio equals 25-29.9 or in case of obesity when the index equals or is greater than 30 kg/m2.

Another way to find out if your weight can damage your body is to measure the circumference of your waist. The waist circumference should be within the limits of 80-88 cm for adult women and up to 101 centimeters for men. If your waist is more than that, no worries! Just add more vegetable foods to your diet and exercise to your daily routines. You will certainly benefit from both.

Meanwhile, misconceptions about own ‘extra weight’ can lead to serious consequences. In March 2020, a group of scientists has published the report of their research in the Nature Journal which has shown that stigmatizing overweight people leads to their psychological and physical problems such as feeling ashamed of their own body, which prevents them from turning for medical help, including issues which are not related to extra weight.

Why Extra Weight is Bad

With that being said, extra weight is really dangerous According to the experts of the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, the abdominal obesity can lead to low “good” cholesterol and high “bad” cholesterol, and problems with blood pressure. Extra weight increases pressure on your joints, causes gallbladder diseases, liver inflammation, prediabetes, or type 2 diabetes. 

Obesity can also cause apnea or snoring. It is often taken lightly without serious thought since apnea leads to a short cessation of breathing, which causes oxygen deprivation and seriously increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Diet and Sports: What is the Best

So far, there is no single cure. For the moment, modern science doesn’t offer a single formula to lose extra weight. There is no diet that would have been ideally suited (or, at least, acceptable) for everyone, and the principle of eating less and moving more doesn’t work in every case. Where one can cut carbohydrates and integrate running in his or her life, another will become neurotic, for example, in case when in the childhood the food was not only the means of satisfying the natural need but a reward, or, because of joint pain as a result of a steep increase in exercise intensity

In addition, obesity can result from genetics, chronic stress, wrong medicines, long-term eating habits, hormonal diseases, and depression. There can be several causes at the same time, and only doctors could help to identify them. Until that, don’t worry and don’t stick to “superdiets” even if your waist is more than 88 (or 100) centimeters. Even though the American scientists explain how to measure your waist, they recommend going for screening instead of self-diagnosis.