Obesity and Weight Loss

Posted by: admin

Americans have a reputation for being overweight, and by overweight I mean obese. You may or may not know this, but obesity can affect everything from fertility to heart health.

Having a lot of extra fat on your body causes a huge number of health problems. In fact, it’s more than reasonable to say that being fat causes most of the health problems we know about today, and many others we’re not even aware of yet.

Obesity is an epidemic that grows for both children and adults each and every day. And that epidemic keeps leading us further and further down the road to serious health problems.

Obesity is such a problem in today’s society in fact, that it’s now common place to see weight loss reality shows on tv. And the sad thing is, kids and adults alike will sit and watch those shows instead of getting up and doing something about their own weight problems.

There are though, many ways to lose body fat. All of the approaches work well, but they all take time, effort, commitment, and sacrifice. And that’s where some of the major obesity problems of today come from unfortunately. Everyone wants instant gratification. So they eat microwaved meal, or buy a burger and fries at a fast food stop. They wolf down ready made cakes and pies while watching TV, or they munch on candy and drink sodas with lots of sugar and little nutritional value.

Most people don’t eat whole foods because it’s not available in a drive through and takes time to prepare at home. Conveniences are putting on pounds faster than we get realize.

The growing problems with obesity in today’s society stem from many things though. One major problem of course is the convenience foods we already mentioned, and another is misinformation.

For instance, years ago the general public was told to stop eating foods which were high in fat. The problem is that people started supplementing their diets with empty calories instead.

In the average grocery store, you can look in the candy isle and find many sugar-laden sweets which advertise in big bold letters on the packaging: “No Fat!” or “Low Fat!”. As if somehow that means the candy is healthy for you.

One other problem is being satiated from the meals and snacks we eat. When you cut fat drastically low or eliminate it all together from your diet, you’ll find yourself hungrier more often throughout the day. This is because fat actually helps fill us up and keeps us satisfied for longer periods of time. That doesn’t mean you should go the opposite directions and eat all high fat foods either though, because there are both good and bad fats.

Now another source of misunderstanding or misinformation is the generally accepted FDA food pyramid that most people grew up with. This pyramid was designed with the best intentions, but it was interpreted badly over the years.

Carbohydrates in the form of bread products was said to be the primary types of foods we should eat. Now, back in the 1940’s or 1950’s and earlier, this may have been quite true.

In years past, “bread” was a lot different than it is today, and back then people did a lot more manual labor than they do today. When you have a lot of physical activity in your life, your body needs and uses those carbohydrates.

Today”bread” has nothing like grains or fiber in it. In fact, what most people call bread doesn’t even have any vitamins or nutrition in it unless something has been added. This is because manufacturers strip out all of the good nutrition, then they add fake synthetic stuff back in.

Activity levels are also quite different today than they were 50 or more years ago too. Instead of working our bodies each day, we work our minds instead.

There is nothing wrong with working the mind of course, but due to the lifestyle changes we now have, we need to work harder at exercising our bodies or we need to change our eating styles. Ideally we should be doing both.