What is Obesity?

Welcome to my Obesity blog! I am Shirley, a first year university student that is currently in a contemporary health issue class trying to learn about issues that are happening around us that may affect us. I believe understanding how different types of issues may affect us and knowing how to deal with them is important because we all want to live a healthy life.  I’m especially interested into understanding why maintaining a healthy weight affects our lives and how it blocks us from having a healthy life. I will be investigating issues around this area and hope to have a better understanding of the consequences of not having a balanced weight. 

The main issue of healthy weight I would like to focus on is about obesity, because right now, according to WHO, obesity is one of the main problems around the globe that is affecting us from achieving the goal of maintaining a healthy weight. So, my target audience is people who are obese and want to have more a an in depth understanding about it. To begin, I believe when I point out the word “obesity” people will think about the words “fat” and “skinny”. Also, many people interpret the issue of obese as simply people who consume too much food and don’t watch their weight, but that’s not what obesity only is. Obesity is having excess fat in our body that harms us in many ways. You can be obese from your genetics, having less physical activity, illness or simply living in a wrong lifestyle! And behind all these causes may lead to chronic diseases and cardiovascular disease associated with obesity. That is mainly why the rates of people being obese are increasing every year and all mortality and morbidity rates are spiking up!

And how can we know if we are obese?  Well, it’s definitely not just simply thinking that looking fat means obese, because your definition of fat can be very bias. To be precise, you need to know what your body mass index (BMI) is. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), if your BMI is greater or equal to 25, you’re just overweight; if it’s greater than or equal to 30, you’re obese. To reduce the problem of obesity, it’s best to limit your calorie intake, consider what food you should consume and have a regular basis of physical activity.

The main point of this blog is to inform people to try to avoid being obese, do regular exercise and really investigate on what you are consuming and if it’s healthy for you! Moreover, this blog will contain a lot of facts and my personal opinions about obesity and I hope you all will be interested with my posts!