So, do you need anymore incentive not to be obese? How about if you’re obese, you may just lop off an entire decade of your life!
According to a new analysis of 57 studies that included nearly a million people, average obesity can shorten your life between 2-4 years. Being very obese pushes it to 8-10 years!
In the study, men and women who had BMIs between 30 and 35 took 2-4 years off their lives. Having a BMI between 40 and 45 is the range that can take a decade off your life. Every 5 BMI points that you add to your total boosts mortality risk by 30 percent!
“This is scary and something that we should pay close attention to,” says Ali Mokdad, Ph.D., a professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Patrick J. Ronayne is suing his former employer, Winston Golf and Winston Manufacturing of 3Sixty Group LLC, after being fired from his $75,000-a-year sales position because “he was not a flat belly.” That statement is reported as being told to Ronayne in his lawsuit claim, and that he “was replaced by a thinner person.”
From BMIs to skin calipers, there are many different tools and calculations you can perform to measure your weight. But many of these numbers are just that – numbers that are averaged from hundreds of statistics on risk factors for illness and other health predictors. What about finding your ideal weight? The one that feels good for you and most importantly, that is realistic.
In a recent health article by Karly Randolph Pitman, she elucidated five tips for finding your healthy weight. The five tips are:
1) Recognize Your Own Body and its Own History. Self magazine features a healthy weight calculator that takes into account your age, height, children and activity level. As a caveat, I took this health assessment and if I weighed what the Self Happy Weight calculator suggested I could weigh, I would not be very happy. While Pitman’s other tips for finding your ideal weight are pretty spot-on, this Self Happy Weight Calculator could use some fine-tuning.
If you think the sky is falling when it comes to the health of the American people, I have some disquieting news to make you even more anxious. New statistics from the U.S. Government show that the number of people who are overweight has been surpassed by the number of people who are obese.
Obesity and overweight are calculated using the BMI (Body Mass Index) formula. Someone with a BMI of 25 to 29 is classified as overweight, while 30 to 40 counts as obese. Anything over a 40 is morbidly obese.
1 Comments
