A Weighty Matter

What do we understand by the term obesity? Is it just a polite word for fatness? Well, yes, but there?s more to it than that. Epidemiology, which is the scientific study of factors that cause health problems in individuals and whole societies, defines obesity by more definite standards. A person is officially obese if his or her weight is unhealthily disproportionate to his or her height (bad Body Mass Index) and if other health risks accompany that condition.

BMI (or Body Mass Index) is calculated by dividing the person’s weight in kilograms by the square of his or her height, measured in meters. By this standard, a person whose BMI measures 30.0 - 39.9 is diagnosed as obese. By a general yardstick, males that carry around more than 25% body fat are obese. In the case of women, the indicative figure is 30% because women necessarily have more fat deposits needed by or resulting from childbearing.

When I joined Weight Watchers, I was definitely fat extremely so. I had had one minor cardiac incident  and I knew that it was time to get real. However, I was not really sure of why I was cursed with the excessive fat, because I was a manic dieter. It was true that I gave in to food binges occasionally, but the periods of dieting far outweighed those. At Weight watchers, I learned a few things that made my condition clearer to me.

The very fact that I used to alternate excessive eating and dieting had confused my metabolism enough to choose its own course of action uncompromising fatness. I was also told that my high-stress job as advertising executive had much to do with it (I slept four hours on a lucky night). On the advice of my doctor, I had quit smoking and had taken no precautions to prevent the boomerang effect this would have on my weight. I did lose weight eventually, but it required a complete revision of my lifestyle.

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who are genetically predisposed to obesity, you have a bigger struggle ahead of you than others. There were two techniques that helped me immensely in by battle of the bulge. One was drinking a glass of warm water with the juice of half a lime and a teaspoon of honey mixed into it first thing in the morning. This cut my food intake considerably and seemed to help in metabolizing the existing fat faster. A friend of mine states she had great success with a variant on this. She drank a cup of water with three teaspoons of limejuice with some honey and half a teaspoon of pepper powder in it for half a year and managed to get off all her appetite suppressants with this concoction.