Causes of Overweight

Modern mass media are overloaded with ads and images of beautiful and very slim models, that is why overwhelming majority of young ladies and women are under a great effect of “Barbie syndrome”. Every woman desires to have a physical appearance and body of the Barbie doll, which has been a worldwide standard of beauty for many decades. However, doctors and medical specialists express their concern and pay pubic attention on the fact that excessive thinness and skinniness must not be accepted as ideal beauty since it can not be associated with good health. Undoubtedly, being too slim is not less harmful to your health than being overweight, and every lady has to remember that the best solution is to have a normal healthy weight, which is somewhere in between those two extremes.

It is possible to evaluate your weight and body fatness using BMI, or Body Mass Index. In order to do this, you need to know your exact height (H, in feet or meters) and weight (W, in pounds or kg). You can use special BMI online calculators, or simply find out this index using the following formula:

BMI = W / H²

Check out the results for your particular situation:

If your BMI is somewhere between 18.5 and 24.9, you do not have to think about reducing weight because you are in the safest weight category. Any BMI that is higher than 30 indicates that you have a certain type of obesity. It is very dangerous to your health and you really need to follow a strict diet. If your BMI is over 40, you need to see a doctor as soon as possible. Finally, if your BMI is lower than 18.5, it means that you are underweight, that is also quite risky for your health.

If your BMI is between 25 and 29.9, you have some extra weight which must be put off not by using aggressive approaches, but by developing good eating habits, changing your diet and increasing the amounts of physical exercise and activities in your daily routine. In this situation it is necessary to start reducing your weight especially if you already have some health problems. Otherwise, you will start feeling the effects of numerous negative factors, such as increased levels of cholesterol, problems with blood pressure and so on.

You should keep in mind that BMI does not work for everyone: it is not an effective approach to weight assessment for pregnant women and children below 18. The concept of BMI is based on the assumption that extra weight occurs only as a result of fat deposits in your body and it does not take into account your muscle mass. That is why it is possible to use special tables available online, which correlate BMI results in the context of your age, sex and even race.

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It is a common knowledge that such factors as overeating and lack of physical activity are the main causes of overweight and obesity. Such aspects as our eating habits and environment play less important, but still large roles in our body weight dynamics. Finally, it is possible to name such minor causes as genetic predisposition, metabolism specifics, some illnesses, aging, emotional, socioeconomic and cultural factors, etc. There is a great deal of reasons which can lead to weight problems, that is why weight management is considered to be a very complex health problem.

• Overeating and Negative Energy Balance. The studies showed that obese people usually eat 1.5 – 2 times more proteins, carbs and fats than it is necessary for normal function of their body. Moreover, obese people always tend to eat sweet, fatty and very caloric foods. Certainly, in order to satisfy their large body’s needs, obese people consume more foods and drinks, that results in overeating and inability to burn the calories they received. In other words, the amounts of calories (energy) they receive with food and drinks are much higher than the amounts of the calories they spend for body functions and physical activities. That is how energy disbalance occurs, and permanent prevalence of calorie intake over calorie spendings leads to weight gain and obesity.
• Physical Inactivity. Modern people have an extreme lack of physical activities, because we spend the majority of our time watching TV or sitting in front our computers. Also, we use our cars instead of walking, and our usual daily chores hardly require some serious physical activities. At that, our sedentary life-style plays a major role in weight management, because we do not spent all the energy we receive from foods and store it in the form of fat. Average norms of our physiological needs make us spend about 600 Kcal a day, but we hardly spend 200-300 Kcal. The specialists argue that those people, who spend 2 hours a day watching TV have a strong tendency to become obese. In addition to that, obese people usually try to limit their physical activities, that leads to gaining extra weight and more limits to physical activities. This way they fall into a vicious circle: inactivity leads to increased weight gain, and weight gain leads to increased inactivity. That is why it usually takes a lot of efforts to break this circle.
• Bad Eating Habits. What we eat and how we eat affects our weight a lot. Many people have no time for having normal meals at work, so they try to compensate this with overeating in the evening. Having snacks and eating on feet does not bring to anything good as well. Modern fast food industry is a known killer of our health, not only because of the abundance of harmful fats and acids in those hamburgers and French fries, but also because of oversized portions and fast eating. Also, there is a great deal of spicy, fatty, oversalted and overcooked foods in our daily diet. Consuming a lot of coffee, energy or alcoholic drinks also leads to weight gains.
• Environmental Factors. They include excessive amounts of fast food, alcoholic and energy drinks advertisements, poor quality products in our super-markets and lack of access to healthy foods, our working schedules, lack of sidewalks, playgrounds, recreation facilities in modern cosmopolitan cities, and so on. Undoubtedly, this everything leads to promoting laziness and poor weight management.
• Genetic Predisposition. In many cases, overweight and obesity run in families, and the specialists say that over 50% of obese people are under effect of genetic predisposition to being overweight. Genes can affect the amounts of fat your body stores. However, it was proven that the genetic factor can get activated only when it is accompanied with other factors, such as bad eating habits and physical inactivity.
• Illnesses. Some health conditions, such as hypothyroidism, Cushing’s syndrome, hormone problems, problems with hypothalamus, binge-eating and other eating disorders can cause weight gaining. In such situation, it is crucial to treat the health condition first, and then start combating the problem of overweight.
• Medications. Taking some antidepressants, cortocosteroids or other medicines, which affect the routine processes of calorie burning in your body, may lead to weight gain.
• Emotional Factors. Emotional factors are sometimes underestimated as the important causes of weight gain. When we are stressed out, worried, angry or depressed, we frequently tend to compensate our nervous tension with eating nuts, pop-corns, sunflower seeds and other quite caloric foods. Therefore, we consume more calories than we usually do, and if they are not spend in exrta physical activities, we start storing extra calories and gaining weight.
• Other Sociocultural Factors. It is possible to name some other factors which impact our weight. Aging leads to less physical activity, causing weight gaining. Pregnancy is another cause of weight changes in women. Finally, the people who have constant lack of sleep, or are trying to quit smoking are also reported to have a tendency to eating more and gaining weight.

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