Today I’m sharing information from Dr. Arya Sharma from the Canadian Obesity Network, and Dr. Jean-Philippe Chaput from the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group. They helped me better understand the consequences of being overweight or obese, and why it’s important that obesity was recently classified a disease by the Canadian Medical Association.
Did you know that over half of the Canadian population is struggling with obesity or excess weight?
To make matters worse, losing weight is often very difficult, and keeping it off is even harder. In fact, our modern society has made it almost certain that you’ll gain weight. As Dr. Chaput puts it “weight gain is a sign of our contemporary way of living or collateral damage in the physiological struggle against modernity”. We’ve programmed easy into almost every aspect of our lives.
So, what if you have obesity? Is it all doom and gloom? No.
In fact, if you are overweight, obese and otherwise healthy (i.e., good blood pressure and cholesterol, or mental health is A-OK) then you may be better off than your leaner counterpart. If you’re meeting (or almost meeting) current Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines, your risk of premature death is drastically reduced. In certain cases, higher body weights can actually be protective against disease.
If you’re not physically active, and you are overweight or obese, your risk of disease is unfortunately much higher than your lean and/or fit counterpart.
The easiest way to understand if you have a “healthy weight” is to calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI).* Dr. Sharma* does caution that BMI is not perfect and may lead to misclassification of weight status. He suggests you think of obesity as “when your body weight affects your health”. This can be anything from cardiovascular health to mental health or healthy body image. If you’re concerned, it’s a safe bet to have a quick chat with your health care provider.
So what can you do to make sure you’re your healthiest self?
- Maintain a stable weight and measure your weight often. Try for once a month. You should be able to stay in the same weight range for most of your adult life regardless of the weight category you’re in.
- If you do gain weight (helllllo holidays!), figure out what triggered this weight gain and act on it AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. The sooner you can identify weight gain, the more likely you are to succeed at weight loss and to get yourself back to a normal weight, or whatever “normal” means to you.
- If you’ve gained weight due to an injury or illness, contact your health care professional to get some support. The Canadian Medical Association declared obesity as a disease just before the first ever World Obesity Day was held October 11, 2015, which means that even more so than before, your doctor is there to support you.
- Remember that the quality of treatment you get should not depend on how you gained the weight. Unfortunately weight bias and discrimination is very real, and you don’t deserve to be subjected to it. Losing weight is difficult and to be successful, you’ll need support in various aspects of your life (e.g., not just work, but your home and social groups as well). Identifying underlying causes of weight gain are incredibly important, but should not be tied to how you’re treated as a person.
- Incorporate physical activity into your day. If you’re not normally very active, try to add in small amounts of physical activity as a stepping stone to meeting the guidelines. Every little bit counts. Even in the absence of weight loss, increasing your physical activity will have a wide range of positive health impacts.
Want more information? The Canadian Obesity Network is the largest obesity network in the world, and it’s free to join! They have some great resources for health professionals as well as the general public, so it’s a great resource to have in your back pocket.
Still looking for more or can’t find what you need? Leave a comment below and let us know what we can do to support you to sit less and move more.
Notes
- To understand if you have a healthy weight, you’ll have to calculate your Body Mass Index, or BMI. You’ll need your height and your weight. Try to be accurate and honest! BMI isn’t a perfect measure but it is pretty good at giving an indication of relative size, but not how healthy you are. If you are worried, you can then make an appointment with your doctor to see if you’re at risk for any health problems.
- A huge thank you to Dr. Arya Sharma and Dr. Jean-Philippe Chaput who helped provide some information for this post.
The post Ask the experts, is obesity a disease? appeared first on Pep Talk.