What is obesity? Why do people become obese?
Have you ever felt your pants suddenly too tight, a flight of stairs draining you out, tired all the time with knees and back hurting? Well, then you should know these are signs of weight gain and our body’s way of telling it’s time to check on ourselves. Yet, we don’t realise that with the gradual pile of kilos in our body we are actually becoming an obesity statistic. In India obesity is never taken seriously unless one starts facing some severe health issues. Often, people realise they are obese only when they check their cholesterol, blood pressure or pre-diabetes and are shocked when told by doctors they are obese. Most of them don’t realise that minuscule increase in weight might not seem like a harm but when left unchecked it can become a serious health issue. If you don’t keep a check on what you eat, drink or don’t exercise you can go from being overweight to obese.
Why are we becoming fat?
A bad inactive lifestyle and an unhealthy diet are the major reasons for obesity. The wide range of fast food options, and corporate jobs of higher social status has completely cut out physical workouts. If at all there’s any little activity that’s involved in the present lifestyle it is because people pay to work either by joining gym, yoga or aerobics etc. These activities are usually of about 45 min – 1hour people think they have done enough for the day, where in reality we should be changing our entire day into a mini-workout session if one want to maintain a healthy weight. As you get older the metabolism slows down and this makes our body collect fat. So, the regular intake of food and activities remain the same but we tend to put on weight. This is common for everybody but with us Indians very rarely people workout after a certain age thus leading to severe weight gain. On a basic level, it makes it evident that weight gain/obesity is hugely influenced by our present lifestyle.
How does one become obese from overweight
Some people freak out about gaining a kilo while the others are easy about being overweight way above than it should be. Some people lose about 5 kgs and start looking weak and get odd comments from people while gaining 5kgs wouldn’t really show off so much as losing. It doesn’t take much to go from overweight to obese, it happens even before you realise it. And by the time one realises it, it might already be too late. It is easier to handle weight problem at an earlier stage but it hardly shows as a different when they put on just a few kilos.
The ideal way to stay fit is to keep monitoring your weight and not to wait to take an action when you see there’s a change. And to develop the mindset of taking an action when you realise you are overweight.
