The role of diet in preventing underweight, overweight, and obesity

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Your weight and height play a large role in determining what is a healthy weight for you to be.  Together, those two numbers make up your body mass index aka your BMI.  Being overweight means that your total BMI is between 25 to 29.9, being underweight means that a person would have a BMI below 18.5 (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, p. 335).  A good chunk of the patients that I interact with at my job are obese.  This means that their BMI is over 30 (Sizer & Whitney, 2013, p. 336).  When I see them it is not always because they are seeking a nutritionist or a diet and fitness program but more because they have been obese for so long other aspects of their health are deteriorating.

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Due to the fact that a good chunk of America is either overweight or obese, we have all heard what implications arise from maintaining a lifestyle like that.  Overweight and obese people have too much body fat and are at a much greater risk of developing heart disease and various other chronic illnesses that can shorten their life span.

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In order to make America and other countries healthier there does need to be some preventative action taken.  While childhood obesity is a big issue in America right now, children learned to be obese by their loved ones.  Some may not agree with that statement but I see it at least once a week with my own eyes.  Parents and grandparents give in to the begging of their children and grandchildren and allow them to eat nothing but junk, they allow them to sit around watching television or playing video games for hours on end.  This is the behavior that needs to stop.  

Since being healthy has not seemed to work as a motivator for a lot of Americans, there needs to be something that they will care about at stake.  Something that will make us get off the couch and out of the drive thru line.  Unfortunately a lot of the time it takes a major health event that will land us in the hospital that gives us the wake-up call that we need to make a change.

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One article that I found interesting about how to control the obesity epidemic stated that, “Why continue a treatment with such a failure rate? Perhaps we have stuck with the weight loss paradigm because we cannot imagine another way to health. However, one option is to De-emphasize weight and instead focus on the behaviors of healthy living. That would be a focus on health at every size.” (Bliss, 2011)  I really liked her take on this because truthfully, in the eleven years that I have worked in healthcare I have seen people of all shapes and sizes.  Just because a person might weigh more does not mean that they are in poorer health than a smaller sized person.  

Your diet plays a major role in whether you are underweight, overweight or obese.  Granted there are individuals out there that no matter what they eat they can’t gain weight.  For the majority of us though, that is not the problem.  Eating nothing but McDonald’s or Wendy’s will eventually make you overweight or even obese.  Learning how to cook healthier meals at home using fresh ingredients will help you maintain a healthy weight and improve your overall health.

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I did not issue a challenge at the end of my last blog but I do have a challenge for you this time.  If you eat at a fast food restaurant more often than not this challenge will be a little more difficult.  This week I challenge not just myself but you to limit yourself to eating at a fast food restaurant only once for the whole week.  It doesn’t sound too hard right?

Bliss, K. (2011). Ending the war on obesity and starting a new peace movement. 

      Psyccritiques, 56(25), doi:10.1037/a0023989

Sizer, F. & Whitney, E. (2013).  Nutrition: Concepts and Controversies (13th ed.).  Mason, 
      OH: Cengage Learning.