The skinny on weight loss (part three)
Sections in this article range:
(i) The absolute truth about drinking water and weight loss
(ii) Why you must detox to lose weight
(iii) How being slightly overweight is cliniclly proven to enable you to live longer
(iv) The real truth about permanent weight loss
(v) Tired of different diets? The last lifestyle diet that you can follow forever.
The crux of this article is that a clinical medically well respected study relating to mortality and weight has clearly found that overweight people actually have longer lifespans than people at normal weight.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the exact finding was that the results prove that overweight people with a BMI of less than 30 is associated with significantly lower mortality overall relative to people with a normal range BMI.
So simply: If you are packing a few extra pounds you are more likely to live longer than those people that are not packing a few extra pounds. (Please see the bottom of this article for the Journal of the American Medical Association web link to the actual clinical study.)
What your weight should be and BMI:
When medical professionals (and dieticians, gym instructors and others) decide whether you are overweight, underweight or obese they apply your weight to something called your body mass index or BMI.
But what exactly is BMI?
BMI is very simply your body mass divided by the square of your height and you are considered to be overweight if your BMI is higher than 25. There are many issues with BMI, most body builders with little or no fat are overweight or even obese when applying their BMI ratio. Similarly people with large bone structures, athletes and others are completely incorrectly classified as well. Then there is the age differences (from children to the elderly) as well as differences between males and females and all the other issues there exists with applying a simple ratio calculation to an entire species.
So, clearly BMI is severely flawed as a standard and in the USA being overweight is currently described as having a BMI of between 25 and 28 (in the UK this number is 18.5 to 24.9). These variances are used to allow for all the mentioned differences between people. Still, it is severely flawed as some people may actually be considered overweight at a BMI of 28 and others may actually be exactly at their goal weight or even underweight.
Bottom line and point that is being made here is that you should not just look at a BMI number to judge your weight situation and you can safely discard the opinion of anyone that does simply judge you on this number as the number alone means little by itself.
Remember that only a few months ago, most medical experts would have advised you that you will be more healthy and live longer if you have a BMI of less than 25. Now, after clinical studies and additional publications by experts in the field of weight, fat and adipose tissue, many informed medical practitioners will now advise you to focus less on being overweight and more on avoiding stress as it has become clear that slightly fat people actually live longer than skinny ones…
Yes, it is still extremely unhealthy to be morbidly obese, being morbidly obese exposes you to increased risks of cancer, diabetes and meany other medical conditions, (more about this is the next article in this series) but slightly overweight and with a BMI of 30, with a normal body type (and probably a lot more if you are a male bodybuilder with a large bone structure) simply means that you will outlive the rest…
References:
Journal of the American Medical Association:
Association of All-Cause Mortality With Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1555137
Advertising
All information provided for information & education purposes only. Nothing published on https://dietmy.com is intended as substitution for medical advice, diagnosis, or for any treatment.
