Weight and Health Correlations

Weight and health are not necessarily correlated. It happens that slightly overweight people are in good health, while fit persons can suffer from a precarious health due to living conditions, heredity, accidents or other things.

What's for sure, is the fact that once somebody becomes obese, health problems won't cease to appear. The heart would have to pump faster to keep pace with such a big body and to manage to send the oxygenated blood to all cells, and this means a higher blood pressure. The knees and the spinal cord would have to bear additional weight they were not built to support, therefore this may cause pains and even disabilities. The skin would be stressed at maximum, and despite the fact that it is very elastic, stretch marks are prone to appear. These are only a few reasons for losing weight and they should be enough for most of us.

There are weight charts developed by scientists, which show the correlation between height and weight for men and women, and the range of normality, of under-weight or of over-weight. But there is more than that: the percentage of body fat is also important. For example, a sportsman and a sedentary person, although they would have the same height and weight, the sedentary would have a bigger fat percentage in his body. In the sportsman case, the muscular mass is bigger due to workouts he does on regular basis, which means he has less fat in the body.

None of those charts however mentions the relationship between weight and health, so each of us needs to carefully assess that and draw conclusions. These conclusions would be unique, as we are unique beings, with unique traits, particularities and needs. This is why programs like Diet to Go proved to be among the ones with the highest success rate.

This is a video explaining the Body Mass Index and the correlations between different measurements of the body parts, from waist to hips, neck diameter and chest diameter: