Why do you put on weight?
You become overweight if you consume more calories than your body burns over a period of time, and thus accumulate them as fat. This is not to say that all overweight people eat uncontrollably. Excess weight usually comes creeping on over a matter of years as a result of a fairly small imbalance between consumption and burning of calories. A tendency towards an imbalance in calorie accounts is to a large extent hereditary - i.e. genetically conditioned. When you live in a society such as ours, where food has a low saturation effect, and the need for physical activity in our normal everyday lives is minimal, this leads to becoming overweight. Therefore, though you may not always be able to help it, if you have a tendency towards becoming overweight, you can always do something about it.
Body mass Index – BMI
A lot of people ask themselves: At what point do I become overweight? You can easily find out the answer by means of your height, weight and by waist measurements.
The international research on obesity primarily uses the so-called BMI numbers when assessing weight and obesity. Your BMI is calculated according to the following formula:
Weight in kilos divided by height in meters = BMI .
A BMI result of between 18.5 and 25 is regarded as the healthiest. If your BMI is between 25 and 30, you are moderately overweight, and if your BMI is above 30, you are categorized as being heavily overweight. The BMI limits apply to all adults and provide an indication of the degree of overweight. But the BMI does not give us any information about how much of the weight is fat and muscles, respectively. Since muscles weigh more than fat, a person with a large total mass of muscles will have a fairly high BMI without being overweight. This is seen in particular among men who train a lot.
Waist measurement
A rather simpler way of measuring whether you are overweight is by looking at your waist measurement. The waist measurement is a better measure of overweight than both weight and BMI, since a large waist measurement among non-pregnant people can hardly be due to a large total muscle mass, but rather is a direct measure of the amount of fat on the body. The drawback to this method is, however, that some people tend to deposit fat in places other than around the waist. There are many individual differences which mean that you should not get too caught up with these various measurements. It is important to use your common sense and take an honest look at your naked body in the mirror once in a while.
