OBESITY REVISITED
Before continuing, let me remind you of two things: a.- A good figure to know if you are obese is that of Body Mass Index (BMI), calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters. If your BMI is 30 or higher you are obese and if you are above 25 you need to lose weight, and b.- The intake of calories per day for healthy adults of about 70 Kg should be about 2000 and 1600 for a man and a woman, respectively.
To put that number within context, you should know that a cheeseburger and fries represents about 2600 cal. That means, that anything above that that you eat during the day is in excess. And one gets fat, because our body is designed to storage all of the excess calories that you eat.
In 2002 a team from the University of Colorado quantified how many "unnecessary calories" people are eating. They estimated that obese people gained an average of 1.8 to two pounds each year. And the number is rising. They calculated that each pound gained represented 3,500 calories.
Now, for sure you have seen countless ads telling you that this or that machine or exercise will make you lose all the extra weight. Well you can take a look at Anne Collins Webpage to find out how many calories you burn according to the type of exercise you do and for how long you do it. Meanwhile, as an example, you should know that you have to jog for 81 minutes at 5mph to burn the equivalent of a cheeseburger and fries. Do your math to find out for how long you'll have to jog to burn the excess that you eat if you go above your normal calories intake.
Exercising is good for your health, because among other things it makes you burn more calories in rest, but is practically impossible to lose weight by exercising alone. Thus, you must diet. In my previous articles I talked about diets.
The conclusion seems obvious: Obesity is mainly due to overeating. The problem starts early in life because if while kids are growing up they overeat as if it were normal, with no control whatsoever, the harder it will be later on in life for them to burn that extra weight. Thus, a good education and support campaign could be the solution for
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