Why are some people eat a lot but still have a slim body and you always keep diet but hard to lose weight? You follow a diet plan that was from your friend who lose 10 pounds within 2 weeks, but you failed. What is the reason that somebody possess a slim body since young and you are totally another way?
Nowadays, more and more people getting obese. Based on the estimated statistics from World Health Organization (WHO), there are more than 1.9 billion (39 %) adults who aged 18 years and older were overweight, and 650 million or 13 % were obese. This figure is tripled the number of obesity in the year 1975.
To determine whether you are overweight can be measured based on a simple calculation method, body mass index (BMI), by dividing your weight in kg with the square of your height in metre.
For adults, those with BMI ≥25 is considered as overweight, while if their BMI is ≥30, they are obese.
Many people want to get off their weight in order to fit into their favourite dress or get a better-looking body shape. But obesity is not just about appearance. It brings you lots of health risk, especially chronic diseases, such as hypertension, heart break, cancer, stroke and even death. They are tended to have high blood pressure and high cholesterol level.
Obesity is already become one of the most powerful killers for people, it caused a high death to toll every year.
WHY
Then, why is so many people getting obese?
As human, we take in food every day, basically 3 meals. Those foods that we take in contain calories which is the energy in the food, providing us with energy for survival and our daily basis.
Almost every food we consumed consists of calories, including all the vegetables. If we can use up all the calories intake for a day in daily activities, then we are in energy balance.
However, if we spend less energy, the extra energy will be stored as fat. This mechanism is the evolutionary survival skill of our bodies which the fat will be transformed back to the energy we need when we are in scarcity.
For us, if we consume excess energy every day; then, we must be getting weight.
A positive energy balance of 2 kcal/day could increase body weight by about 1 kg in 10 years.
Seidall and Flegall (1997)
ENGERGY EXPENDITURE
The energy expenditure is the number of calories your body used up. Total energy expenditure of our bodies is mainly composed by basal metabolic rate (BMR) and physical activities.
As simply, if you lie on bed for whole day your body will still spend certain amount of energy in order for your body functions like respiration.
BMR almost take up 70 % of your daily energy expenditure. It can be varied depending on your body mass, age and gender. The left energy expenditure comes from thermic effect of food and physical activities.
Thermic effect of carbohydrate intake increases greater than thermic effect after fat intake. For physical activities, if you do two-hour gym per day, the composition of energy expenditure contributed by physical activities should be increased.
People who are getting weight easily are those people to have either or both low BMR and low physical activities. Low BMR can be linked to genetic inheritance.
GENES
Our weight is mainly determined by genes and lifestyle. Genes are the sequences that synthesize a specific function of protein and genes give a specific trait.
Children inherit their genes from their parents. Genetic traits explain why your body composition, body size and shape are similar to those of your parents.
If one or two of your parents is obese, then you will also get a high chance to become obese. However, gene is not the only determining factor of obesity, it also depends on the environment.
Even though you may inherit the traits from your parents who are obese, but you can still get off the weight by exercise or diet. For example, a labor who earns from physical works can never get obese.
Similarly, if you haven’t inherited those traits with high tendency of becoming obesity from your parent, but you have a sedentary lifestyle, you still have a high chance to become obese.
LIFESTYLE
a. Food intake
Food intake is one of the remarkable factors leading to high population of obesity. In U.S., the widespread of fast food restaurants bring fast food to become daily meals among American.
The portion of fast foods had increased significantly for the past 50 years. With a promotion by just adding a minimum amount of money to change from medium-sized to large-sized, people tend to choose the large-sized set, and this increases their amount of food consumption.
The increase of the number of fast food restaurants, canned food and various food options make people can get food easily. Foods with high calories basically taste better over those with lower calories, for example fried chicken compared with salad.
People get food easily and they will keep eating to fulfil their appetite. Most of the time, fast food will be the first choice as for its cheaper price, fast, and good taste.
b. Physical inactivity
Otherwise, people tend to move to a sedentary lifestyle today. There are lots of convenience to help us get thing faster and easier from the advanced technology.
People will ride on their automobiles or take the commuters instead of walking or biking. Most of the people works in office for whole day. After returning home, they choose to become a potato couch rather than having physical recreation.
Various types of TV programmes and computer games established to make people, including adults and children, to just sit on their chairs and reject to have more physical movements.
For their leisure time, video games and TV are preferred over outdoor activities by them. Less people want to go jogging and have a picnic, they are more willing to just stay at home to spend out their whole weekend.
CONCLUSION
From an article reported by Manson and his colleagues in 2004, at least 300,000 premature deaths, and $ 90 billion indirect healthcare costs are caused by obesity and sedentary lifestyle per year in the US alone.
Obesity is not just about appearance; it is closely related to our lives and health. Without the consciousness to maintain a healthy lifestyle, then we will just get more weight in the future.
Citation
Manson, J. E., Skerrett, P. J., Greenland, P., & Vanltallie, T. B. (2004). The escalating pandemics of obesity and sedentary lifestyle: a call to action for clinicians. Archives of internal medicine, 164(3), 249-258.
Seidell, J. C., & Flegal, K.M. (1997). Assessing obesity: classification and epidemiology. British medical bulletin, 53(2), 238-252.
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