Am I Obese, How Do We Know?

Obesity means having far too much body fat. It's about much more than your clothing size or how you look. It can seriously affect your health.
Your whole body feels it, from your joints to your heart, blood pressure, blood sugar, and other systems. The extra fat cells produce inflammation and various hormones, which boosts your odds of chronic medical conditions.
If it seems like those odds are stacked against you, remember that it's possible to beat them. The first step is to know where you stand.

The problem with having too much body fat is that it slows down body functions. If you have too much body fat the first sign I had was fatigue. I was tired all the time. Sometimes I even woke up tired. What causes this? Your body has to maintain all parts of your body, even your fat. When too much of the nutrition you eat has to be used to maintain fat, then your body will slow down other functions to have the energy to maintain this large body mass. Body mass is made up of muscle and fat. When you first became fully grown, usually 18-21 years of age, that's the weight that your body organs are made to handle. As you add weight as an adult your organs can get larger but that's not always a good thing. Enlarged organs don't work any better. You should know how much fat is too much.

Are You Obese?

You step on the scale and your doctor or nurse notes your weight. They might also measure your waist since it's especially risky to have too much belly fat.
If your doctor says you're overweight, that means "you're slightly over what's considered healthy," says Y. Claire Wang, MD. She's co-director of the Obesity Prevention Initiative at Columbia University.
Obesity is beyond being simply overweight. It's very common -- more than 1 in 3 U.S. adults are obese. If you're one of them, you can work to lose fat. Although it's not easy, you can start to turn things around.

Surprising Reasons You're Gaining Weight

What Your BMI Says

For adults, experts usually define obesity based on body mass index, or BMI. This formula relates your weight to your height.
For instance, if two people weigh the same amount but one is taller than the other, the taller person will have a lower BMI. To find your body mass index, plug your height and weight into a BMI calculator.
If your BMI is:
  • Below 18.5: underweight
  • 18.5-24.9: normal
  • 25-29.9: overweight
  • 30 or higher: obese
If you're obese, your doctor might talk about the categories of obesity:
  • Obesity level l: BMI of 30-34.9
  • Obesity level ll: BMI of 35-39.9
  • Obesity level lll: BMI of 40 or higher, which some also call "morbid" obesity
Another method and the one I like is using the tape measure. The only measurement I care about is my waist. The other parts of your body will lose inches proportionally to your waist.

Your waist should be measured at the naval and in a straight line from the naval around your back and then back to the naval. If you're 70 inches tall you should have a 35-inch waist, one-half your height. If you're 60 inches tall you should have a 30-inch waist. I'm not really interested in what a person weighs. If you want to be at a healthy weight your body should be in proportion. If you are an athlete with little body fat and larger than normal muscle mass, you might be considered "overweight" using the BMI method. 

If you really want to lose the extra flab you can get help, I write 4 blogs and I’ve written two E-books. E-books are the easiest and cheapest way to learn about any subject without groping through hundreds of website looking for the material you want.

My first e-book is “HowBadDoYouWantToLoseWeight” and it sells for $2.99 on most online bookstores like Amazon, BN.com, iBook, Kobo, and Gardner books in the U.K.

My second e-book is available in the same stores. And on smash words.com. If you use the smash word promotional code You can get my second book for $1.99 (PJ42H). Just type in the search line “getting to a healthy weight”.
 

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