Even if you are obese, you can be healthier....
Today's Post: Monday, 10-4-2010
Yesterday, Sunday, 10-3-2010, LiveScience.com had this headline:
“Obese But Healthy? Gray Area Confounds Science.”
It seems that some people who measure as obese on their BMI score have normal readings on things like blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugars.
This is despite the fact that 60 to 75 % of similarly fat or obese people do NOT have such good readings.
1. What makes the difference?
The article had some of the answers.
There were several.
And, I’ll add some they didn’t have.
The healthy people were fat or fatter everywhere except their abdomen or belly. Their fat tended to be in their arms or hips or thighs.
The less than healthy people were always fat in their abdomen or belly. And, it’s abdominal fat, particularly the internal visceral fat that tends to cause or be associated with bad health in various ways.
That has some corollary or explanatory reasons.
Stress is known to cause both worsening of these health indicators and to increase your abdominal and visceral fat.
So, obese people who weren’t extra stressed for long periods tended to have healthier readings and smaller bellies.
Sedentary work and recreation are known to both cause both worsening of these health indicators and to increase your abdominal and visceral fat.
And, that’s compounded for people who don’t get regular exercise.
So, obese people who were a bit less sedentary at work and likely watched less TV and particularly those who exercised regularly tended to have healthier readings and smaller bellies.
The Livescience.com story didn’t have it. But another way that some obese people stay healthy or healthier and have better health indicators is to take supplements that improve these readings. Last Friday, we listed some that increase HDL and lower LDL and triglycerides, for example.
Similarly, the people who were obese but not healthy I suspect quite strongly, ONLY ate and drank poor quality and fattening stuff with little nutrition while the healthy ones ate and drank a mix of both such junk foods AND also ate some real vegetables and fruit and other healthier choices. I also suspect strongly that a follow up study would show the healthier obese people drank dramatically less soft drinks than the less healthy majority. One definite that a follow up study would almost certainly find I think, is that the less healthy obese people probably ate significantly more trans fats and hydrogenated oils.
So, similarly to people who take supplements, the healthier obese people got more and better nutrition from their food and drink despite taking in too much bad stuff also. While the less healthy obese people were more harmed by their poor quality foods and drinks.
Lastly, though it’s not mentioned in the article, the healthier obese people were almost certainly exposed to less tobacco smoke.
2. Did you know there is a way to tell if you may have an obesity related health problem even before or without getting your health indicators checked?
Because so many of these factors contribute to abdominal obesity, you can measure your waist with a simple tape measure and get an indication.
Here’s how to measure your waist. Walk around just a bit so you feel how tense your tummy muscles usually are. Then measure your waist at your belly button where the circle made by the tape is parallel to the floor and not slanted up or down. If you have neither pulled in or tensed your tummy muscles extra nor pushed out your tummy or over relaxed its muscles, that reading is pretty accurate. (Most obese people who were pants wear them lower than that where they are not quite so big around. But that place on them is NOT the right place to measure the true size of their waist for this purpose.)
If you are a man and your waist measures 40.0 inches or more, your health is at risk. And, if it’s 46.0 or more inches, you are almost certainly at risk and should have your health indicators checked at a lab or by a doctor.
If you are a woman and your waist measures 35.0 inches or more, your health is at risk. And, if it’s 40.0 or more inches, you are almost certainly at risk and should have your health indicators checked at a lab or by a doctor.
In fact, if you are only overweight on the scale and get such waist measurements, you are just as at risk.
3. What can you do if you have a too large waist measurement or are obese on the scale?
The most important things are these.:
a) If you haven’t already, begin to do some regular exercise even if you start with a two minute walk on your lunch hour or 5 crunches first thing in the morning three mornings a week. Then gradually build up to more and keep doing regular exercise most days of every week.
Separate research has found that fat exercisers, while not as healthy as nonfat ones, are MORE healthy than sedentary thin people.
(Skinny but sedentary people, in fact, are actually fat inside with underdeveloped muscles that are lighter than they should be. They are fat too; but just don’t look like it.)
This means that even before you lose weight or build up to enough exercise to cause you to lose weight, you can be DRAMATICALLY healthier if you begin regular exercise and continue it.
b) Rate the TV shows you watch and cut back on the less important to you until you watch 15 or 20 hours a week or less. Your health will be better because you’ll be less sedentary even if you take a nap or do very light housework instead. Plus you may find you have time to exercise once you do this.
c) Once you have started regular exercise and have been doing it a couple of weeks, also do some strength training even if you start with 5 pound dumbbells or with just one or two from the knee pushups. Do strength training every other day.
d) Add some new fruit and vegetable foods to what you eat. Even one a day more will help.
e) Simply eliminate the worst and most fattening and health damaging foods and drinks. Even if you eat and drink the same number of calories or healthier ones, you will dramatically improve your health. And, since that’s actually quite hard to do, you may find that 20 to 60 pounds simply leaves you with no further effort needed. The more of this stuff you eat and drink now, the more weight you’ll lose on the scale.
Drink no regular or diet soft drinks. Regular soft drinks fatten without cutting your hunger. And diet soft drinks fatten just as much since they are an appetite stimulant drug for sugary foods! Drink water, or tea, or coffee, or club soda instead.
Always read labels. If a food shows any trans fat reading above 0.0 grams, do NOT buy that item or ingest it.
(Similarly, if it has ANY hydrogenated oil listed as an ingredient, it HAS enough trans fats to harm you even if it lists a serving with 0.0 transfats. They can list 0.0 grams even if it really has .49 grams and you likely will eat five servings or more for over 2.45 grams of trans fats. Oops !)
Get that item from a better food provider or make it homemade if you like it. But do NOT knowingly ingest it with such stuff in it. It will make you fatter in your belly and harm your health.
Buy no foods or drink no drinks with high fructose corn syrup even if they re-label it as corn sugar. It IS more harmful than real sugar if you eat tons of it as most people do now. And, about 30 % of it has mercury in it too. So there is an extra incentive to NOT eat or drink stuff containing it.
Avoid tobacco smoke as close to 100 % of the time as you can get. Whether smoked or breathed in as second hand smoke, it causes heart disease and triggers heart attacks. And, the more you are exposed to the worse your heart health indicators will be.
It’s harder due to how much the stuff has taken over the diet of the average person.
But try to eliminate foods made from refined grains and eat less grain foods and then get only 100 % whole grain foods.
And, also cut the amount of sugar you eat in half; and then cut that in half; and then cut that in half once you get used to it. The average American ingests 22 teaspoons of sugar a day. And, for most Americans, the safe amount to eat is closer to 2 teaspoons!
The bad news is that if a lot of these categories apply to you, your health is seriously at risk.
The much better news is that you can dramatically improve your health and health indicators by making these changes.
And, the best news of all is that making most of these changes produces near effortless weight and fat loss.
Today's Post: Monday, 10-4-2010
Yesterday, Sunday, 10-3-2010, LiveScience.com had this headline:
“Obese But Healthy? Gray Area Confounds Science.”
It seems that some people who measure as obese on their BMI score have normal readings on things like blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugars.
This is despite the fact that 60 to 75 % of similarly fat or obese people do NOT have such good readings.
1. What makes the difference?
The article had some of the answers.
There were several.
And, I’ll add some they didn’t have.
The healthy people were fat or fatter everywhere except their abdomen or belly. Their fat tended to be in their arms or hips or thighs.
The less than healthy people were always fat in their abdomen or belly. And, it’s abdominal fat, particularly the internal visceral fat that tends to cause or be associated with bad health in various ways.
That has some corollary or explanatory reasons.
Stress is known to cause both worsening of these health indicators and to increase your abdominal and visceral fat.
So, obese people who weren’t extra stressed for long periods tended to have healthier readings and smaller bellies.
Sedentary work and recreation are known to both cause both worsening of these health indicators and to increase your abdominal and visceral fat.
And, that’s compounded for people who don’t get regular exercise.
So, obese people who were a bit less sedentary at work and likely watched less TV and particularly those who exercised regularly tended to have healthier readings and smaller bellies.
The Livescience.com story didn’t have it. But another way that some obese people stay healthy or healthier and have better health indicators is to take supplements that improve these readings. Last Friday, we listed some that increase HDL and lower LDL and triglycerides, for example.
Similarly, the people who were obese but not healthy I suspect quite strongly, ONLY ate and drank poor quality and fattening stuff with little nutrition while the healthy ones ate and drank a mix of both such junk foods AND also ate some real vegetables and fruit and other healthier choices. I also suspect strongly that a follow up study would show the healthier obese people drank dramatically less soft drinks than the less healthy majority. One definite that a follow up study would almost certainly find I think, is that the less healthy obese people probably ate significantly more trans fats and hydrogenated oils.
So, similarly to people who take supplements, the healthier obese people got more and better nutrition from their food and drink despite taking in too much bad stuff also. While the less healthy obese people were more harmed by their poor quality foods and drinks.
Lastly, though it’s not mentioned in the article, the healthier obese people were almost certainly exposed to less tobacco smoke.
2. Did you know there is a way to tell if you may have an obesity related health problem even before or without getting your health indicators checked?
Because so many of these factors contribute to abdominal obesity, you can measure your waist with a simple tape measure and get an indication.
Here’s how to measure your waist. Walk around just a bit so you feel how tense your tummy muscles usually are. Then measure your waist at your belly button where the circle made by the tape is parallel to the floor and not slanted up or down. If you have neither pulled in or tensed your tummy muscles extra nor pushed out your tummy or over relaxed its muscles, that reading is pretty accurate. (Most obese people who were pants wear them lower than that where they are not quite so big around. But that place on them is NOT the right place to measure the true size of their waist for this purpose.)
If you are a man and your waist measures 40.0 inches or more, your health is at risk. And, if it’s 46.0 or more inches, you are almost certainly at risk and should have your health indicators checked at a lab or by a doctor.
If you are a woman and your waist measures 35.0 inches or more, your health is at risk. And, if it’s 40.0 or more inches, you are almost certainly at risk and should have your health indicators checked at a lab or by a doctor.
In fact, if you are only overweight on the scale and get such waist measurements, you are just as at risk.
3. What can you do if you have a too large waist measurement or are obese on the scale?
The most important things are these.:
a) If you haven’t already, begin to do some regular exercise even if you start with a two minute walk on your lunch hour or 5 crunches first thing in the morning three mornings a week. Then gradually build up to more and keep doing regular exercise most days of every week.
Separate research has found that fat exercisers, while not as healthy as nonfat ones, are MORE healthy than sedentary thin people.
(Skinny but sedentary people, in fact, are actually fat inside with underdeveloped muscles that are lighter than they should be. They are fat too; but just don’t look like it.)
This means that even before you lose weight or build up to enough exercise to cause you to lose weight, you can be DRAMATICALLY healthier if you begin regular exercise and continue it.
b) Rate the TV shows you watch and cut back on the less important to you until you watch 15 or 20 hours a week or less. Your health will be better because you’ll be less sedentary even if you take a nap or do very light housework instead. Plus you may find you have time to exercise once you do this.
c) Once you have started regular exercise and have been doing it a couple of weeks, also do some strength training even if you start with 5 pound dumbbells or with just one or two from the knee pushups. Do strength training every other day.
d) Add some new fruit and vegetable foods to what you eat. Even one a day more will help.
e) Simply eliminate the worst and most fattening and health damaging foods and drinks. Even if you eat and drink the same number of calories or healthier ones, you will dramatically improve your health. And, since that’s actually quite hard to do, you may find that 20 to 60 pounds simply leaves you with no further effort needed. The more of this stuff you eat and drink now, the more weight you’ll lose on the scale.
Drink no regular or diet soft drinks. Regular soft drinks fatten without cutting your hunger. And diet soft drinks fatten just as much since they are an appetite stimulant drug for sugary foods! Drink water, or tea, or coffee, or club soda instead.
Always read labels. If a food shows any trans fat reading above 0.0 grams, do NOT buy that item or ingest it.
(Similarly, if it has ANY hydrogenated oil listed as an ingredient, it HAS enough trans fats to harm you even if it lists a serving with 0.0 transfats. They can list 0.0 grams even if it really has .49 grams and you likely will eat five servings or more for over 2.45 grams of trans fats. Oops !)
Get that item from a better food provider or make it homemade if you like it. But do NOT knowingly ingest it with such stuff in it. It will make you fatter in your belly and harm your health.
Buy no foods or drink no drinks with high fructose corn syrup even if they re-label it as corn sugar. It IS more harmful than real sugar if you eat tons of it as most people do now. And, about 30 % of it has mercury in it too. So there is an extra incentive to NOT eat or drink stuff containing it.
Avoid tobacco smoke as close to 100 % of the time as you can get. Whether smoked or breathed in as second hand smoke, it causes heart disease and triggers heart attacks. And, the more you are exposed to the worse your heart health indicators will be.
It’s harder due to how much the stuff has taken over the diet of the average person.
But try to eliminate foods made from refined grains and eat less grain foods and then get only 100 % whole grain foods.
And, also cut the amount of sugar you eat in half; and then cut that in half; and then cut that in half once you get used to it. The average American ingests 22 teaspoons of sugar a day. And, for most Americans, the safe amount to eat is closer to 2 teaspoons!
The bad news is that if a lot of these categories apply to you, your health is seriously at risk.
The much better news is that you can dramatically improve your health and health indicators by making these changes.
And, the best news of all is that making most of these changes produces near effortless weight and fat loss.
Labels: effective weight loss methods, how to be healthier even when you are just starting to lose weight, how to lose belly fat, why some obese people are healthy
posted by David at 2:27 PM
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