Is Obesity Beautiful?

Beauty is an aesthetic concept. Subjective. A matter of taste. That is why, for me, it is completely irrelevant whether a fat person is beautiful. They can be beautiful, since most overweight people also find a partner — there are people who like them. Many thin people don't find a partner either, so aesthetic beauty is not the point. BUT HEALTH IS!

Obesity — a breeding ground for disease

It is a fully confirmed medical fact that obesity — even moderate overweight — is a "breeding ground" for diseases. Just a few extra kilos set destructive processes in motion in your body, and if you remain chronically obese, by the latest at age 50 it will make you sick. For sure!

A whole range of illnesses directly follow from obesity; they are almost its mandatory companions. Examples include high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems, heart attack, stroke, hormonal disturbances, joint pain, arthritis, osteoarthritis. And of course constant back and lower back pain, then lumbago, herniated disc. The list goes on.

When you're young these don't cause huge problems... but they will seriously complicate the last one or two decades of your life. When your muscles are so weakened that you can't push your huge body out of bed... When abdominal fat compresses your lungs so much they cannot expand and you gasp for air like a fish flung ashore.

By “accepting” your fatness you also determine the quality of life of your older self.

How obesity destroys

You live well, you get everything from supermarkets, restaurants, pastry shops. You eat at least three times a day, you stop for an ice cream, cake or cola on the way home, you snack a bit at the cinema, in front of the TV. You avoid exercise as if it spread disease... Over years a solid layer of fat forms on you from all the tasty things you shove into your mouth. After all, your body “stores” the surplus for harder times, like grandma putting away preserves.

It ruins your heart

By the time you realize it, you already have 15 kg of excess weight. But you weren't "designed" for x+15kg. Maintaining the extra fat mass imposes extra tasks on your body. Your lungs have to take in more oxygen than planned, your heart has to supply blood to a larger body, etc. You sit in an armchair, but your heart and lungs work in your chest as intensively as if you were in a running race.

It's like constantly pulling a trailer with a passenger car. Obviously that will wear out your car quickly, right? So why do you think your heart won't be worn out by it?

Ideally you would get a second heart for the extra weight — but that's obviously impossible. So your single heart tries to adapt with what it has: it raises the heart rate and narrows the blood vessels, which produces higher pressure. THIS IS THE HEART'S NATURAL RESPONSE TO YOUR LARGER BODY!

Your temples throb, you sweat, you can't tolerate exertion and you go to the doctor. You receive a bunch of blood pressure-lowering drugs. They don't care about anything other than limiting your heart from beating fast and raising the pressure. Yet this is exactly what I wrote: the heart's only option to supply your massively grown body with blood and oxygen is to raise pressure.

A serious trap... the heart should raise pressure, but the medicines won't allow it. Thus your heart constantly works under restriction. Even when it's necessary it cannot raise the pressure, even though it should while you're active.

You think “now everything's fine, I take the medicines, my blood pressure is normal”... true, but you always feel weak, you can't handle exertion and you sometimes become dizzy... "I did everything!" you keep insisting...

But that complacency will soon be spoiled by new complaints.

It makes you diabetic

At a routine check they find your blood sugar is high. You're surprised, although if you've been overweight for a few years you should have expected it.

The connection between so-called type 2 or adult-onset diabetes and obesity is also a medically proven fact. Nowadays it can even appear before the age of forty.

It is caused because your pancreas has to work much harder to "store" the huge amount of excess calories than it was "designed" to. It exhausts early and cannot produce enough insulin. In addition, substances released from your fat make your body less sensitive to insulin.

Diabetes is one of the most insidious diseases that exist. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't cause obvious symptoms — it just destroys.

Slowly but surely it wrecks your blood vessels. Waste products deposit on the walls of your arteries everywhere in your body! These make your vessels stiffer and narrower. Your blood reaches your organs with increasing difficulty.

If the brain vessels are the most affected, in mild cases you're condemned to gradual mental decline. If worse, you get a stroke and become paralyzed. If the heart is affected, you'll leave early from a heart attack. You don't fare any better if the worst happens in your legs, because your toes rot while you're still alive and your feet are amputated bit by bit.

To give a ray of hope: even if you inherited the gene for diabetes, it doesn't mean you will necessarily become diabetic! With a healthy lifestyle and maintaining a healthy weight you could prevent it. This does not apply if you are obese.

By now you have high blood pressure, your heart is exhausted, you are diabetic, you've had a stroke or survived a heart attack. But it's not over yet!

It destroys your joints

The function of your joints is to enable movement. Ligaments and the joint capsule's elastic materials keep them together, but their stability is provided by your muscles.

If your muscles are strong enough they hold your weight and the joint surfaces remain apart. If your muscles can no longer carry your heavy weight, then the bones contact each other with every movement, the cartilage slowly wears off and is destroyed and cannot regenerate.

Your pain intensifies, you move less and less, your muscles weaken further, which increases your pain... this is called a vicious circle. It's very difficult to escape from.

But why can't your muscles carry the load?

Because you have excess weight that you must carry. If you have 15 kg extra, it's like carrying a sack around your neck day and night. Think of a running race. Two runners with the same ability and body weight — at the start one of them has a 15 kg lead weight strapped on. Who do you think has a better chance of winning? Certainly not the one carrying the weight.

The extra weight "chews up" your joints with every movement. A weightlifter lifts an amount exceeding his body weight only for a moment overhead. And then he drops it! You can never put it down. This is an enormous burden for your body.

As long as you're young and healthy, your muscles can cope with the excess. As you age and the above diseases accumulate, you become increasingly weak.

The end result is that you spend your final decade under the "house arrest" of diseases, essentially trapped in your flat. Then the moment comes when you can't push yourself out of bed.

Your child has to care for you, wash you, clean you, feed you. They must give up their job to look after you. Thus they will have no income and they and their family will be financially ruined.

All just because you considered fatness beautiful and didn't act against it in time. Do you still think obesity is beautiful?

Shedding excess weight is damn hard!

The previous general medical opinion was that body weight reflects the balance between energy intake and use. That is:

• if your weight increases, you eat more than you use.
• if your weight decreases, you use more than you put into your mouth.
• if your weight doesn't change... you lose exactly as much as your body needs.

Under this view, losing weight would be extremely simple. If you put less energy into your body through food than you burn with exercise and for basic metabolic functions, weight will fall. For increased exercise and reduced calorie intake you would "only" need willpower. Rise from the armchair and change. A change that you can follow for years without suffering. A two-week self-torture diet campaign is worthless. And there is no pill, shake or anything else that will take 10 kilos off your excess weight in a week while you sit in an armchair watching TV! Such products belong to fairy tales, and you've outgrown those.

With lifestyle change — if you're lucky — results will be visible after a few months.

What if lifestyle change doesn't give the expected result?

Today it is increasingly recognized that obesity results from an extremely complex process. Internal hormonal factors and externally introduced substances affecting adipose tissue and metabolism promote obesity. Plastic packaging releases estrogen-like substances into drinks and foods. Chemicals used in industrial food production accumulate in foods and have adverse effects. These disturb fat metabolism.

If the "eat less and exercise more" method doesn't work for someone, a thorough examination is necessary. One must analyze lifestyle, exercise, meal timing, quantity and content. The hormonal system's health must be examined. It must be discovered what causes the pathological fat metabolism. Consult a specialist, because this obesity makes a healthy life impossible in the long run!

Why it's good not to be obese

Because you'll feel comfortable in your skin. You will tolerate physical exertion. You won't have to visit the doctor. You won't have to pay for medicines.

But what's even more important:

• You won't have a heart attack or stroke at fifty.
• You won't spend the money you painfully saved during life to try to recover your squandered health.
• You won't live paralyzed, helpless and without income — a stroke won't allow you to work and earn, while your expenses only increase.
• You won't have diabetes and your toes won't rot while you're still alive. Your legs won't be amputated.
• Your stomach, liver, kidneys and blood-forming system won't be ruined by medications.
• You can take care of your children and grandchildren.
• Family lunches won't be about your illnesses and fear of death, but about experiences and life.

For me true beauty is health, and from the above you can see that obesity is not healthy at all.

How do you feel now about the question posed in the title?