Weight Loss

A healthy body is one that is bereft of any illness. One important factor that comes in the way of efforts to maintain a healthy body is overweight and obesity.

A healthy body is one that is bereft of any illness. One important factor that comes in the way of efforts to maintain a healthy body is overweight and obesity. The tendency of being overweight or obese is mostly inbuilt into genes of humans. It passes on from one generation to another.

Thus it is important to keep your weight optimum if you want to keep your body healthy regardless of whether you are underweight, slightly overweight, or downright obese. Less than optimum weight mean that your body is getting less nutrition than required. It can alternatively mean that it is getting the requisite nutrition but somehow there is a defect in the digestive mechanism that converts the food into useful energy for the body.

Adequate nutrition is important for the body to maintain health because it provides the source of energy required to do any work. Unless the body receives adequate nutrition, it cannot maintain all its subsystems working at peak levels. It becomes easy for illness to invade the body if its immune defense system is not kept tuned with adequate nutrition.

On the other hand more than adequate nutrition directly contributes to more than optimum body weight. More than adequate nutrition means that the body is required to store the extra fat in the cells. Optimum amount of fat storage in the body helps it convert the fat into energy during emergencies. However, it is the extra fat stored in the body that contributes to more than optimum body weight.

On the contrary, the storage of more than optimum fat in the body adds to cholesterol in the bloodstream and simply loads the body with useless extra weight. You then become obese. Obesity acts as a drag on the body and is harmful as it overworks the heart. It also overworks all the subsystems of the body. As a result the body feels tired even with miniscule effort.

With overstressed body subsystems, the body cannot remain in good health for long. The more the extra weight gained the unhealthier the body will become. The result is that the body’s immune defense system is weakened. Germs find it easy to attack your body. Your health is then jeopardized by chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Heart disease is not far behind.

Therefore, it is most important to manage the weight of your body if you want to remain healthy. To find out if your weight is more than optimum, you need to simply divide your weight by the square of your height. The resulting figure in kilograms per square meters (kg/sq.m) is known as the body mass index (BMI).

Your body weight is said to be optimum if it is in the range of 18.5 to 24.9 kg/sq.m. If less than that then you are underweight. If your body mass index is in the range of 25 to 29.9 kg/sq.m then you are overweight. If your BMI is more than 30 kg/sq.m, it means you are obese. If it is more than 40 kg/sq.m, you are highly obese and illnesses can claim you as a victim very soon.

Therefore you can manage obesity by actually managing your BMI. This really means controlling your weight through the right dietary measures and a regular exercise schedule.