Everyone knows that some people appear to eat ice-cream, cake, and other tasty fattening foods, and never seem to gain weight. Others, like myself it feels, just have to walk past Greggs and their waistlines start to grow.
Why is this? What are the causes of obesity? What allows one person to remain thin without effort but demands that another struggle to avoid gaining weight or regaining the pounds he or she has previously lost?
On a simple straightforward level, your weight ultimately depends on the number of calories you consume, how many of these you store, and how many you burn up. However, these factors can be influenced by a combination of genes and environment. Both can affect your physiology (such as how fast you burn calories), as well as your behaviour (the types of food you choose to eat, for instance). This interplay between these factors continues throughout your whole life.
The balance of calories stored and burned depends on your genetic makeup, your levels of physical activity, and the resting energy expenditure (the number of calories your body burns while at rest). If you consistently burn all the calories you consume in the course of the day, you will maintain or lose weight. If you consume more energy (calories) than you expend you will naturally gain weight.
Excess calories are stored throughout your body as fat. Your body stores this fat within specialised fat cells (adipose tissue) - either by enlarging fat cells, which are always present in the body, or by creating more of them. if you decrease your food intake and consume fewer calories than you burn up, if you exercise more and burn up more calories, your body will reduce some of your fat stores. When this happens, fat cells shrink, along with your waistline.
To date, more than 400 different genes have been implicated in the causes of overweight or obesity. They can affect appetite, satiety (the sense of being full), metabolism, food cravings, body-fat distribution, and the tendency to use eating as a way to cope with stress.
But a recent study by the National Taiwan University, who analysed the DNA and lifestyles of 18,424 volunteers, aged between 30 and 70, suggested having "fat genes" is no excuse for being overweight, as exercise can help to keep you trim. Scientists found even people with a high genetic risk of obesity stayed slim if they exercised regularly. They said that jogging appeared to be the most effective.
Professor Steve Jones, from University College London (they do seem to get involved in a lot of these kind of studies), said: "for some, too many cakes and a lazy life makes them fat.m A regular run will solve that problem."
HMHB says:
Lazza is someone who has used food as a way to deal with stress, so we do come at this from a good angle. To say, it is easy to control your weight if you exercise more and eat less, is probably a trueism, but it is of course not that straight forward.
Ultimately, any overeating must be reviewed. If it is just a love of food - then people need to be educated on how to stay healthy and fit, but also enjoying their meals.
However, if there is an underlying mental health reason behind gluttony, that needs to be addressed at the same time. But people need to ask for help, and recognise the problem before they get too large and other health issues start to compound the problem.
Obesity can cause many other health problems. It is preventable in most cases, but costs the NHS huge amounts of money. There is almost an entitlement from people who are vastly overweight, where they resolve themselves of responsibility. I recall a fat man recently in the paper saying he was doing all he could to lose weight. Meanwhile he had an oven next to his bed so he could heat up takeaways when they were delivered.
Ultimtately it is up to as as individuals to look after the miracle that is our body. It is an amazing construct, that should be an impossibility, yet we treat it with such disdain and complacency.
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