How Important is it to Maintain a Healthy Weight?

What exactly is a healthy weight? Medical professionals often use the Body Mass Index (BMI) to determine whether you're overweight or not, although this is a flawed system, since your weight is set against your height. The taller you are, the heavier you can be without being classed as overweight. However, this does not take into account muscle mass, so that if you're extremely athletic and muscular, you could be considered overweight or obese despite being very fit and perfectly healthy.

Waist measurement is another way to determine whether you could stand to lose a few pounds, so that if you're a woman with a waist measurement over 35 inches or a man with one over 40 inches you could be at greater risk of developing health problems. Once again, though, no allowances are made for your activity levels. Just because you're carrying extra weight doesn't necessarily mean you lead an inactive lifestyle and exercise is an excellent way to stay fit and improve your health prospects. How big you are doesn't necessarily reflect this.

However, most people are well aware that they're overweight in whatever way it is measured and that they do not have the kind of lifestyle which makes it easy to maintain a healthy weight. If you work long, irregular hours it is obviously going to be a challenge to fit exercise into your schedule and to take the time needed to prepare nutritious and balanced meals. You may simply eat food on the go, so that you mainly eat convenience meals and fast food. After all, when you come home from work all you want to do is sit back and relax or play with your kids. How much you weigh may not enter your mind until you have to buy clothes or you take a trip to the doctor.

It is only when you're told that your weight could lead to serious health problems that will ultimately shorten your life that you have to face up to the fact that your weight can no longer be ignored. Losing weight is difficult and so it is convenient to tell yourself that you're just big-boned or that you're curvy rather than overweight, but weight is not merely a superficial issue. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what dress size you wear; what matters is that you are happy and healthy. If you are carrying so much weight that your quality of life is beginning to suffer you can't continue to bury your head in the sand.

Consequently, although there may be room for manoeuvre in what constitutes a healthy weight – since everyone is different – you know when your weight is becoming a problem. If you're too skinny or too heavy to live the kind of life you want, then it is obviously time to address the issue of your weight. For most people it is carrying too much weight that is the problem, but being underweight can also be detrimental to your health, as extremely skinny individuals will already know. It is therefore reasonably important to maintain a healthy weight for the sake of your physical and mental well-being.

Why is it so Difficult to Maintain a Healthy Weight?

According to the CDC, over a third of Americans are classed as obese, which suggests that obesity is far from being an individual problem. Society has undergone profound changes over the past century, so that nowadays most people are engaged in less physically intensive work; they have more options about what to do with their free time and they generally spend less time preparing nutritionally balanced meals. One of the consequences of this is that people’s waistlines have been expanding.

Dietary habits
The way in which people eat and the food that they choose to consume is very different from years gone by. There are so many more options than there used to be that the choice can be overwhelming. Food is relatively cheap, particularly the kinds of food that are crammed full of sugar and fat, and so people are more likely to opt for cheap, tasty and quick-to-prepare meals than to pick out raw ingredients and prepare a meal from scratch. Individuals are less likely to sit around the table and eat together as a family and will often graze on snacks instead of eating proper meals or will eat snacks as well as hefty meals.

Activity levels
Besides picking up poor eating habits, a significant proportion of the population are not getting enough exercise either. Most people have jobs which involve a lot of sitting around, which doesn’t exactly burn many calories. On top of this, they are not making enough effort to incorporate exercise into their day. It is recommended that individuals should engage in moderate intensity exercise at least five times a week to stay healthy, but even this amount is too much for some. However, this doesn’t stop them from eating as if they are training to run a marathon. The end result is, of course, weight gain.

General lifestyles
For many people, modern society is characterised by stress. People may not be working in physically demanding jobs, but that doesn’t make the work they do any easier. Most are having to work long hours for very little reward and there are other stresses that people have to deal with, from financial issues to relationship worries. None of this is new, but there seems to be less stability in people’s lives than in the past and many people turn to food for comfort in times of stress. Not only that, stress can lead to the excess production of cortisol, a hormone which can promote weight gain.

It therefore isn’t difficult to see why it is so many people struggle to maintain a healthy weight. Individuals find themselves with less certainty in their lives, worried about what the future holds in store, and food provides them with a cheap way of feeling better about everything. In their spare time they want to relax and enjoy what they’re doing, and so they are more likely to switch on the television than go to the gym. Unfortunately, because people aren’t making enough effort to keep their calorie intake in check, they end up weighing more than they would like, which could have a detrimental impact on their health.