Obesity means having excess body fat and increases the risk of diseases like diabetes and heart disease. It occurs when calorie intake exceeds calories burned due to factors like genetics, diet of high-fat foods, and physical inactivity. Maintaining a healthy diet with more fruits and vegetables while being physically active can help prevent weight gain and related diseases. Reasons why obesity continues to be a problem include changes to diets with more processed foods and less home cooking, increasing sedentary lifestyles with less physical activity, and ineffective yo-yo dieting instead of sustainable lifestyle changes with healthy eating and exercise habits long-term.

1. OBESITY
A HURDLE TO OVERTAKE
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2. Obesity means having too much body fat. It is different from
being overweight, which means weighing too much. The weight
may come from muscle, bone, fat and/or body water. Both terms
mean that a person's weight is greater than what's considered
healthy for his or her height.
Obesity occurs over time when you eat more calories than you
use. The balance between calories-in and calories-out differs for
each person. Factors that might tip the balance include your
genetic makeup, overeating, eating high-fat foods and not being
physically active.
Being obese increases your risk of diabetes, heart
disease, stroke, arthritis and some cancers. If you are
obese, losing even 5 to 10 percent of your weight can delay or
prevent some of these diseases.
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3. Reasons why obesity is still a problem include….
1. CHANGES TO OUR DIETS
Multiple lifestyle changes were independently associated with long-term
weight gain, including changes in the consumption of specific foods and
beverages, physical activity, alcohol use, television watching, and smoking
habits. Strong positive associations with weight change were seen for
starches, refined grains, and processed foods. Some foods —
vegetables, nuts, fruits, and whole grains — were associated with less weight
gain when consumption was actually increased. Obviously, such foods
provide calories and cannot violate thermodynamic laws. Their inverse
associations with weight gain suggest that the increase in their consumption
reduced the intake of other foods to a greater (caloric) extent, decreasing the
overall amount of energy consumed. Yogurt consumption was also associated
with less weight gain in all three cohorts. What needs to happen? We need to
start eating healthy diets again. We need to consume more fresh, locally
grown fruits and veggies. We need to cook in the home, where we have
control over the calorie, fat and sugar content of our diets. Communities
need to make access to local markets readily available as well as cost-
effective for lower-income families. Eating unhealthy diets shouldn’t be
cheaper than diets that contain healthy food options.
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4. 2. PHYSICAL ACTIVITY…OR LACK THERE OF
There’s increasing evidence that our sedentary lives are putting millions of us at
increased risk of health problems and even early death. The link between
inactivity and obesity and poorer health generally identified in is illuminating but
scarcely surprising. In our increasingly technological age, even moderately
strenuous physical activity is something most of us don’t experience on a daily
basis. The average child of today now watches between three to four hours of
television daily — and spends additional hours on the Internet.
Meanwhile, walking and cycling have been replaced by automobile travel for all
but the shortest distances, and for adults, the workplace has become increasingly
automated as well.
That’s the problem. But it does have a solution — creating home, work and school
environments that promote regular physical activity. It won’t be easy, but
then, nothing important ever is.
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5. 3. YO-YO DIETING
Yo-yo diet resulted in large fluctuations in these health measures, decreasing
during the low-fat diet and increasing to a diabetic state during the high-fat diet.
When health measures during the high fat and low-fat diet regimens of the yo-yo
diet group were averaged, their "average health" was improved compared with
obese mice that stayed on the high-fat diet.
What needs to happen? We need to stop “dieting” to lose weight and implement
healthy changes to our diets. This includes adopting a lifestyle change which
includes healthy foods all of the time in addition to physical activity. While these
changes may be difficult in the beginning, they will get easier with time. In the
long run, healthy lifestyle changes will lead to weight loss and an overall
improvement in your health.
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