Nutrition

As asked many times over, how does one become overweight to the point of obesity? Though I am far from a doctor or scientist, after a little research it becomes clear that this issue is akin to the debate of which came first — the chicken or the egg. Does it come down to a simple matter of control of our eating patterns, or are we prey to companies who create high-fat, high-sugar foods without our knowing it?

We'd all like to think that it takes a profoundly lazy person to be so inactive and eat so poorly that they gain a substantial amount of weight. Of course, for some that is the case, but by and large I believe that people do care about their health. Unfortunately, many of us live in a time where it is difficult to eat healthy meals and get as much exercise as we should be. However, many people consider themselves healthy (or at least not unhealthy) when in fact they quite often are not. It seems that many people are quite content to be a little overweight, and of course they have that right. Many will argue that one does not need to be lean to be healthy, and in certain circumstances I will agree — I have seen it with my own eyes, in the case of a successful middle-aged marathon runner who is more than fifty pounds overweight. But this is the exception to the rule. I had always imagined that I was in better shape than I was. I figured that just because I had gained a few (that turned out to be almost thirty) pounds didn't mean that I wasn't in decent shape. I knew there were muscles under there somewhere. Of course, I hadn't seen them in a few years, and now that I think about it, climbing a couple of sets of stairs was becoming more and more difficult. You know the rest of the story.

To get back on track, we get fat from a combination of lack of proper exercise and terrible eating habits, the latter of which is the topic of this month's article.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, very close to two-thirds of all American adults are overweight, and nearly half of those who are overweight are obese ("extremely or grossly overweight"), accounting for a full 61.3 million people over the age of twenty.

According the BME Megasurvey, a little over one third of those surveyed describe their weight as being 'overweight,' with just 2.3% of those surveyed indicating that they would describe themselves as being "extremely overweight." I may not be a doctor, and I'm certainly no statistician, but quite simply there seems to be a very wide gap between Americans who think they are overweight (36.8%), and those who actually are overweight (64.5%). To extrapolate, nearly half of overweight people are in denial about being overweight, which is a telling sign of our times. It doesn't take a leap of faith to figure out that on the whole, we don't eat nearly as healthy as we should. Overweight and obesity-related illness cost American taxpayers $122.9 billion per year, second only to smoking-related illness. So the next time you ask somebody to 'butt out,' don'
source:www.bmezine.com