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MOLECULES, DIETS AND OBESITY III

© Juan C. Mendible

With these principles in mind, the first question is: Am I obese or overweight? One way to have a rough estimate is by knowing your body mass index (a relationship between your height and your weight). You are considered to be obese if its value is 30 or more.

If you are overweight and you want to lose those extra pounds, you have to know a few things before starting a diet. First, you should know that the shape of your body is determined genetically and that you are going to live with it all of your life.

There are three types of body shapes: ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph. The first one corresponds to people that are thin, with slender hips and not well muscled. The second one describes people who are round, with pear-shaped bodies with a smooth look due to a higher fat-to-muscle ratio in their extremities. The third type corresponds to those persons that have broader shoulders and an hourglass shape with a higher muscle-to-fat ratio than other body types.

Usually, people are a combination of all three but leaning more toward one of them. You must understand that trying to change the body shape your were born with can be as frustrating as it is impossible.

Second, obesity has being associated with low self-esteem levels. This means that if you are overweight or obese, it is probable that you could have some other problems in your life. Thus, it will be important to talk to your doctor about it, because if you are overeating to compensate for some kind of problem, no diet is going to help you.

The third consideration is that there are some statistics that indicate that few people are obese due to metabolic disorders, probably less than 10%. If you have some kind of disorder, you will have to watch very carefully what and how much you eat, but still you will have to eat more than what your condition allows you to in order to get fat.

The fourth step is to check your blood values of cholesterol, glucose, HDL-cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol to see how they compare with the normal limits. Now, let's talk about diets and dieting. Nowadays, there are several popular diets, such as the high protein-low carbohydrate ones and Dean Ornish´s diet. In my opinion, the first ones put your organism under the stress that I described above. There is some scientific evidence that suggests, on one hand, that some persons who had been on the regime are being diagnosed with kidney stones; and, on the other, that saturated fats have been associated with different types of cancer.