We don’t understand just how serious excess body fat is.
The reason body confidence has got mixed up in the “fat shaming” argument, is because people have become so obsessed with body image, that they pivot their entire situation on how they look in the mirror. If you are overweight, but you are confident about how you look, then everything’s fine right? Well, yeah, if you feel comfortable about developing preventable metabolic disease and being a drain on your loved ones and our society’s resources now and in the future. It might seem aggressive but that is the statement you are making. Of course, nobody sees it that way because everyone has, as we said before, normalised obesity as being something that’s just about the way we look, rather than thinking about its negative health impact.
Covid19 has forced us all to consider our actions and feelings in the context of their of our health and longevity; hand-washing, staying at home when we’re ill, noticing symptoms of disease early on, listening to what our bodies are telling us. But it has also prompted some pretty bold statements. My brief literature search and it’s seventeen hundred papers showed me one thing: I was right. Sadly, obesity is a chronic disease. And it appears that there is an association between your BMI (our pretty primitive way of measuring obesity, but more on that in another article…) and your severity of Covid symptoms. Finally, the world has stepped up to say that if you are fat, you are suffering, whether you like your body shape or not.
Obesity is associated with a state of chronic inflammation. Obesity is now classed as a disease – and it’s a pandemic, more insidious and subtle than the SARS type disease we have come to associate with worldwide illness and death. More and more time and energy is being put into obesity research. We can already see the intimate relationship between obesity and metabolic diseases like type II diabetes. But I believe that in the not so distant future, there will be more and more diseases proven to be triggered and worsened by your excess body fat; gum disease, respiratory diseases. I have no evidence for these yet, but I strongly believe it will come.
If covid has taught us anything, it’s how important it is to take care of ourselves with those small, everyday actions. It’s that a foundation of health – positive mindset, gut health, nutrition, exercise, all those little things – is what creates our best chance in staying well and fending off disease and more importantly, avoiding placing that ever-growing strain on our health service and our loved ones.
My closing message is this: We ALL have a responsibility to look after ourselves, not just so we can enjoy a long, happy and fruitful life, but so that others are not burdened with our declining health. We HAVE to start being honest about how serious obesity is. We need to keep exploring the best preventive advice, because healthcare is drowning under the weight of the symptoms of our own lifestyle. They don’t have the time, the expertise or the resources to take responsibility for your health and your preventable conditions. Right now, the health service is throwing water on a chip pan and that fire is burning more and more brightly. We need to be the ones to take the fat off the heat and stop things exploding. That all starts with honesty. Losing weight is not easy – if it were, obesity wouldn’t be the massive growing problem it is. But by standing up and admitting, accepting that being overweight is NOT healthy, we have taken the first step. Often obesity as a disease is actually a symptom of something else – an emotion. We need to take a step, admit we have a problem and then work on weeding out that emotion, building a great relationship with food and taking responsibility for the impact our choices have on our future.