image by Nick Holliday

If you are currently very overweight, chances are good you are frequently experiencing some kind of chronic disease. Allow me to use my personal history as an example.

As a kid I used to live an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, drinking several soda's every day and eating fast food whenever I could. I was so unhealthy and overweight I couldn’t even run a mile without having to take a break several times. I always was that kid in class with the serious immunity problems, sneezing all the time and snorting, annoying just about everybody around me. To think of it, it was actually kind of sad.

Now it's true that a lot of this could be caused by the several allergies which I’ve been carrying with me since my birth, but I am sure there's more to it than just that. You'll soon read why.

When I graduated from high school I decided to make some big changes. I finally made some time to teach myself a healthy lifestyle, I started jogging frequently and was obsessed with learning all about healthy nutrition. This learning process took me several months in which I read website articles, browsed blogs, read books and experienced many setbacks trying to lose weight. But in the end, it was all worth it.

At the age of 20 I was finally a healthy guy who could run 10 miles nonstop and didn’t break a sweat when climbing stairs. The biggest difference, however, was with my allergies. These were actually disappearing! Most notably was my hay fever, which totally disappeared and upto this day never returned again. This was the allergy for which I was hospitalized as a kid. This was also the allergy that gave me teary eyes made me sneeze nonstop during the day. Yet suddenly this allergy had disappeared. I was actually cured from this life terrorizing illness!

Of course, you could suggest my allergy disappeared naturally and my healthy lifestyle didn't influence anything at all. I’m not a doctor and I couldn’t say for sure, but I like to think that my healthy lifestyle did play an important role. Just like I believe that a healthy lifestyle is essential to prevent all kinds of chronic diseases. Let's continue reading and find out more about the relation between weight loss and chronic diseases.

How being overweight causes strain on the body

One way to promote good health is prevention. Although it may sometimes seem more difficult to prevent than to just treat a disease, all health professionals would say the best thing to do is prevent a disease if that is an option. With the rise in obesity in the US, medical treatment costs of chronic diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer, prevention would not only save more lives, but save our country more money as a whole. Prevention allows you to live with a higher quality of life.

One motivation for initiating weight loss is that you don’t want the strains being overweight can put on your body’s systems. Being overweight causes your quality of life to deteriorate in ways you wouldn’t imagine. A part from the most common ways people know being overweight affects the body (saggy skin, stretch marks, depression, etc), the extra fat someone carries, especially around the stomach, can cause strain on the body’s joints (like your knees), lungs, and fertility. The strain being overweight causes on your blood vessels and can affect the amount of important substances your body produces like insulin and affects your body’s ability to fight disease efficiently.

Diseases that have been related to obesity

Many studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between having a high body fat percentage and chronic diseases. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cancer have all been proven to be related to excess body weight. The likelihood that you will get these diseases is even higher if you were overweight as a child.

Weight loss, even if only 10% of your body weight, can dramatically reduce the risks that you will develop these diseases, even if it runes in your family. Now, when I say weight loss, I am referring to losing fat, not muscle or fluid. For some it may be difficult not to lose fluid at first, but overall the goal is to lose the fat.

What can you do to jump start weight loss?

Weight loss can be started immediately by either incorporating more activity in your life while making some dietary changes. For some, it may be easier to start with physical activity or diet, but in the end both are needed to reach a healthy weight and get the health benefits of not being overweight. I have always found that small changes are best before alienating yourself from the food you eat.

To prevent chronic diseases, one small change might be switching from regular soda to diet soda. Another small change might be to make sure you have vegetables with every meal for added fiber. This requires planning ahead of course. For physical activity, a small change might be taking the stairs. Another small change might be parking farther away from a building entrance so that you have to walk longer to get to your destination. Once you have made and stuck with these smaller changes, then you can move on to bigger things for faster weight loss like a regular fitness routine and controlling calorie intake by understanding portion sizes and healthy food sources.

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Comments (4)

Good Advice to Start Slow, But Do Start!
written by Steve Kirk , April 02, 2008

You give sage advice to start diet and life style changes in increments. I like your term alienating your body, which is a great way to describe setting yourself up for failure.

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written by Haney , April 09, 2008

Eversince I'm on a low carb diet, the rashes (eczema) on my body subsides too. But I wonder if eczema has anything to do with weight probs.

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written by Alvin - Lower Blood Pressure , April 10, 2008

"Weight loss can be started immediately by either incorporating more activity in your life while making some dietary changes."

This is very true... Just take the stairs instead of elevator, walk for a short distance instead of taking a short bus trip etc. There are many ways, it just depends whether you wanna do it. :)

Weight Loss
written by Chris , May 09, 2008

Im over weight but I still manage 90 minutes of football twice a week.

Not sure about losing the weight as I never seem to ge out of breathe or struggling.