Weight management

This chapter discusses the importance of weight management. The most affective way of managing your weight is by controlling the amount of calories that your body consumes with the amount of exercise that you get in your daily activities. Currently about 66% of Americans are overweight. This number has nearly doubled since the year of 1980. There are two types of fats, subcutaneous fat, visceral fat. Subcutaneous fats are called lipids which affect your nerves, brain lungs, heart and liver. Visceral fats are fats that exist in within your body’s tissues. These are the fats that people are referring to when they are trying to lose weight. It is important to balance your body’s energy with the amount of calories taken in verse the amount of calories that you burn by your physical activities. There are many health risks that apply when your body has an excess of body fat. People who are obese tend to live about 10 to 20 years less then people who are in good physical shape and do not have a lot of excess fat. People who are obese tend to have higher levels of the bad cholesterol which is known as LDL. People with high levels of fats can have problems sleeping, impaired heart functions, hypertension, cancer, skin problems and diabetes. Men and women tend to store fats in different locations on their body. Men tend to store fats in their upper body and usually their face and there stomach. Where women tend to store body fat in their hips, buttocks, and thighs. There are genetic factors that cause some people to gain weight quicker than others. Along with this, it is always important to manage your calorie intake and to make sure that each day you always get a good amount of exercise. The body’s metabolism cannot burn off all the fat and calories that the body takes in on a normal day. If you watch your weight and calorie intake, it will help in losing weight and keeping off the fat. Weight management acquires special significance in today ‘s America where extra weight is turning into a serious problem affecting vast masses of population . The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that more than 56 percent of adults in the U . S . are overweight or obese (Gorrell , 2002 . Therefore , determination of obesity and extra weight and finding new effective ways to lose weight preserving health are al issues for many . At the same time , it is important to design strategies that will keep the weight within limits measures used to assess the extra weight in people , the Body Mass Index (BMI ) computed using the individual ‘s weight and height , is the most popular . Although it does not specifically indicate the amount of bodily fat , it does correlate to direct measures of body fat , such as underwater weighing and dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA (CDC , 2006 . Although this measure provides relatively little information about potential health hazards resulting from extra weight it is used by medical professionals as a quick-and-dirty estimates of potential problems . The formula for the Body Mass Index using pounds and inches is as follows BMI [weight (lb / height (in / height (in )] x 703 The normal body weight is supposed to range between 18 . 5 and 24 . 9 , while people with a BMI exceeding 30 are supposed to be obese It is important to find out whether one ‘s body is overweight or not because weight has strong influence on human health . Health risks related to extra weight include , but are not limited to Type 2 diabetes , heart disease and stroke , cancer , sleep apnea , osteoarthritis gallbladder disease , and fatty liver disease (NIH , 2004 . The increased incidence of heart stroke in overweight individuals is explained by the increase in LDL ( bad ) cholesterol in their blood and rise in blood pressure . In this case , the link is explicit , while the reasons for which extra weight increases the frequency of type 2 diabetes are not exactly clear , although the scholars have established a clear correspondence . The same is true for augmented cancer risk . With sleep apnea , a condition in which a person stops breathing for short periods during the night , the risk is increased by the presence of large amounts of fat around a person ‘s neck in case of extra weight These health risks are enough of a reason to make overweight people aspire to lose at least part of their extra bodily fat . Added to this are the standards of beauty accepted in society that underscore the importance of being slim and even skinny to appeal to others , in particular for women . This is why most overweight people try to struggle to attain two desired end goals – lose weight and keep it off once lost Scholars state that to lose weight , a person needs to make long-term changes in eating and physical activity habits (NIH , 2004 . A healthy diet will include vegetables , fruits , whole grains , and low-fat meat and dairy products (NIH , 2004 .