Obesity: The Scary Truth

Abstract

The amount of deaths that obesity and the diseases that come from being obese or overweight is increasing every year. It is getting out of hand and the people of America should know the truth. I see on the internet that individuals praise overweight/obese people because it has become a trend. What they do not know is what being overweight can do to you, as in give you diabetes, heart problems, and can lead to death. This paper explains obesity and what being overweight or obese can do to you and also what it can do to young children who are obese. The childhood obesity rate seems to be getting higher. I think that obesity should be more investigated instead of praised. I suggest we do more research on obesity and what harm it can do to your body in the future instead of pretending like being extremally obese will not eventually kill you.

Obesity

If Individuals observe American today, they will be able to identify that the rate of obesity has gone up, not just in adults but in children also. For instance, about one-third of all adults in the United States of America are overweight and another third are obese (Kessler,2013). The adults that are in the category of being obese are more likely to end up with diseases faster than the ones who are in the category of being overweight. Being obese leads to many health problems including diabetes, heart disease, and some kinds of cancer (Kessler,2013). What people seem not to understand is that individuals that are in the range of being obese or overweight are more likely to catch the diseases cause by being overweight/obese. As of today, I have observed that every time I see an overweight child, I also see that his or her mother is struggling with thier weight also, so that means they carry that weight onto thier child, I do not just mean physically, also mentally and emotionally.

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An estimated 64.5 percent of Americans older than 20 are overweight (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). When being obese you will have some pain throughout your body. Approximately 83 percent of technologist have reported some pain when moving obese patients (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). When nurses must move obese patients, they most likely will have to call other nurses in the room to help them because the amount of pain there in trying to move with patient. Two-Thirds of Americans weigh more than they should to be healthy (Kessler,2013). The pain that you will go through because of all the body fat you have from being obese will have you crying and in enormous pain.

Fast Food Causes Weight Gain

America today make the fast food industry way cheaper than they healthy one and that causes people to buy the fast food and that makes them gain weight. You would when you go to any fast food restaurant, that the price of a cheeseburger is no more than 2 dollars but a salad will cost you around 5 to 6 dollars and most people go for the cheeseburger because it saves them money. A lot of processed food is marketed to young people. (Kessler,2013). Fast food restaurants, high energy drinks, candy bars, and other snacks are all heavily advertised to teens (Kessler,2013). Overeating is also a way to gain weight quick. A Strange part of the overeating problem is that thin people struggle with it to, they may not be obese but they spend a lot of time thinking about food tempted to eat (Kessler,2013).If that is the case what do you think individual who are overweight do when they think of food? They eat until they cannot take anymore and that's how they gain weight so fast.

Foods loaded with sugar, fat, and salt activates your brain reward center (Kessler2013). When you see food that you know has sugar in it you automatically want to eat it and it'll make you happy. The food industry designs food that are hard to resists (Kessler,2013) The food that have a lot of sugar in them and the ones that taste good are very hard to resist, so instead of resisting you eat it anyway and it makes your taste buds feel good.

Ways to Lose Weight

There are a lot of good ways to help you lose weight. Like going on a diet or exercising or as some people do, they get gastric bypass surgery. Body chemistry can be regulated through regular exercise (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). If you exercise daily, you will boost your metabolism and start losing weight. A BMI over 25kg/m2 is overweight and a BMI over 30kg/m2 is obese (Nakaya,2006). If you are extremely obese or over a 30kg/m2 BMI, you can be approved for gastric bypass surgery. Patients who have undergone gastric surgery keep of at least 50 to 65 percent of excess weight over 5 to 15 years (Metcalf & Metvalf,2007). The risk of infection during surgery can be a detrimental side effect of gastric bypass (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). If you want the safest way to lose weight, I will prefer exercising or dieting because that way you will not have any complications. Statistics show that one in three hundred gastric bypass patients die from the surgery (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007).

Ages to obesity

At birth the human infant contains about 12 percent body fat (Katz & Weaver,2003). As we get older our body fat decreases and if we eat more food our bodies store those foods and if they are unhealthy, they will be stored as fat. During the first years of our life, body fat rises rapidly to reach a peak of about 25 percent by six months and then declines to 18 percent over the next 10 years (Katz & Weaver,2003). The fact that once we get older and older over the next 10 years our body fat decreases and we still can become so severely overweight is shocking. By the age of 18, males have approximately 15 to 18 percent body fat and females have 25 to 28 percent (Katz & Weaver,2003). Women are to gain weight faster than males and it is harder for women to lose weight rather than males. As a woman we tend to try to watch out weight more than males because our appearances are what most important to use but males can weight a ton and not care because they do not get as insecure as females. The frequency of overweight increases with age to reach a peak at 45 to 54 in men and at ages 55 to 64 in women (Katz & Weaver,2003).

Causes to Obesity

There are plenty of ways that can cause individuals to be overweight or obese. One can be going through a lot of pain and food can be their only source of happiness. Obesity and overweight now affect more than 50 percent of adults Americans (Katz &Weaver,2003). The key causes are increased consumption of energy dense, food high in saturated fat, sugar and reduced physical activity (Nakaya,2006). If obese and overweight people do not exercise often, they will have a low metabolism and gain weight very quickly. Child obesity can also stop at the hands of thier parents because they can feed them more fruits and veggies and have them go outside to play to get exercise in. Instead kids nowadays are more into television and phones so they will not even bother to go outside. Several mechanisms led to obesity including neuroendocrine imbalances, drugs, diet, reduced energy expenditure and genetic factors that led to certain syndromes and predisposition to obesity (Katz & Weaver,2003).

Insurnace and workdays

Insurance for obese and overweight individuals are getting much higher over the years since the obesity rate has gone up. According to the national business group on health, obesity cost employers 13 billion a year and results in 39 million lost workdays (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007).Since you are overweight and cannot not work on your feet for very long you will either call out , slack on you work or be sent home and that cost employers their workdays because they have to have someone else fill in your spot. Most obese individuals have Medicaid because they cannot take care of their selves and cannot work and stand on their feet on their own. They will have to get a family member to help them with everything and if that person lives with someone, the person they live with will have to work all the time to pay the bills unless the overweight person get social security from not being able to work. The person who is overweight or obese will have a lot of visits to the hospital due to problems with their body, so they could end up paying hospital bills. Laying in the bed all-day can-do damage to your body, resulting in body damage and making another trip to the hospital.

The Calories We Burn

An inactive individual at rest burns between 800 to 900 kilocalories during a 24-hour period (Katz & Weaver,2003). When you are sleeping you burn more calories than when you are awake. Your muscle is more relaxed when you are asleep. 20 years ago, a cheeseburger had 333 calories, today it has 590 calories (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). So even if we wanted to eat less calories, we would have to find something like a protein bar because today everything has high calories in it. Parents today love feeding their kids a happy meal not knowing it has a lot of calories in it and that can make your child grow up to be overweight because of how they are feeding them. About 17 percent or more than 12 million kids aged 2 to 19 are obese, another 12 million are overweight (Kessler,2013). If parents keep feeding their children fast foods, they will never stop their child from being overweight.

Parents could fix that situation by proving their child with more food options. They can introduce them to fruits and veggies and if they do not like it they could try to make it seem like it is something sweet or make it look like it is something that they eat all the time. Parents will buy their children a happy meal rather than something healthy because it is cheaper. The child will get used to eating that and will always want that certain type of food. There are more people in the world who are overweight than those who are malnourished according to the world health organization (Metcalf &Metcalf,2007). This is because that fast food is so cheap now that even a homeless person could buy food from there. Parents save so much money on buying happy meals rather than getting their child something more expensive like a salad to eat.

What Being Overweight/Obese Can Do To Your Body

When you are overweight or obese, it can take a toll on your body and sometimes you don’t even know it. When you are overweight or obese, it can take a toll on your body and sometimes you don’t even know it. Being obese can bring extreme damage to your body and being overweight will not bring as much damage as if you were obese. The damages that this can do to your body is that it can bring disease and eventually death. A nationwide study found that at least one-third or 7.5 million teens are so out of shape that they are at significant risk of developing heart disease (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). Also, obesity is associated with increased risk of illness, disability and even death (Metcalf & Metcalf,2007). So, you see when you are obese or overweight you have health risks that can end up killing you. Obesity is closely related to several other chronic diseases, including heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, certain cancers, joint diseases, and more (Covington,2017). Saying so this means that obesity is also a disease and it should be looked at as one because in the long run all these diseases can end up killing you.

The Diseases That Obesity Causes

The types of diseases that obesity can cause are heart disease, Diabetes, Cancer, Joint diseases and many more. The primary ones that most individuals get from being overweight/obese will be heart disease and diabetes. Obesity itself is also a disease as I have explained already. Diabetes is the most common that most people would get, and this disease can lead to a lot of things that can hurt you in your future. According to the American diabetes association (ADA), 6.3 percent of the American population suffers from diabetes (Nakaya,2006). Approximately 85 percent of people with diabetes are type 2 and of these, 90 percent are overweight or obese (Nakaya,2006). This means that the category that has diabetes the most are the individuals that are overweight or obese. Being obese can also cause you to have mental illness. While mental health disorders increase the risk for obesity, having obesity also increases the risk of mental health disorders, especially in certain populations (Covignton,2017). You can sleep less, eat less and even not do any physical activity because of that mental illness that obesity has cause you.

Diabetes can do a lot of things to your body especially if your obese. Type 2 diabetes is most caused by obesity and the lack of physical activity, many experts contend (Nakaya,2006). This disease is a major cause of blindness, kidney failure and leg amputation (Nakaya,2006). In some cases when I have seen an obese man or woman, I could tell that they could not see in either the left or right eye.

Heart diseases can send you straight to the hospital. You can have a heart attack. You can have fluid in your heart by all the greasy foods you eat and that can put you in cardiac arrest. You may even have to have heart surgery because of how much food intake your heart has endured. If people want to fix this, they will have to do better at eating and more exercising.

Obesity can cause people a lot of pain but there are ways that they can fix it. For instance, obese people can go outside and play or just take a walk and think about how to change their lives. Being overweight/obese can do a lot of harm to you like cause you to have diabetes and heart problems, it can cause you to lose workdays and can even put you out of a job. America has to stand up and try to help these individuals lose weight or they can eventually die. People can only help themselves but it is no harm to try to help them out either. The claims that excess weight kills 300,000 Americans each year is bizarre and its assumption that overweight people are officially immune to all other causes of death (Nakaya,2006). Obesity can be stopped and should be stopped.

References

1. Covington, M. (2017, Feburary,8). Why Is Obesity A Disease. obesitymedicine.org: Retrieved from https://obesitymedicine.org/why-is-obesity-a-disease/.
2. Katz, S. H & Weaver, W. W. (2003). Encyclopedia of Food and Culture: Obesity to Zoroastrianism. New York, NY: Charles Scribner Sons.
3. Kessler, D. A. (2013). Your Food Is Fooling You. New York, NY: Roaring Book Press
4. Metcalf, T. & Metcalf, G. (2007). Perspective on Disease and Disorders: Obesity. London, UK: Greenhaven Press.
5. Nakaya, A.C. (2006). Obesity: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press.