What a lot of people don't seem to take into consideration is that a very large component of weight gain or weight loss is METABOLISM, or how efficiently your body burns calories.
Example: me. I am 5 feet 6 inches tall and weigh around 128 or 129 lbs. I've never had what you could call a weight problem. But that is because I was blessed with a metabolism that was off the charts.
Metabolism naturally slows down as you get older and that is why a lot of people in between 45 and 60 put on 15 or 20 lbs without even realizing it. Your body just doesn't burn up the calories the way it used to and you need to eat a lot less just to maintain your weight. I found that out the hard way when I ballooned to 141 lbs and realized I couldn't scarf up junk food in my 50s the way I could in my 20s and 30s. I lost 12 lbs by cutting out the junk food and skipping second helpings. I found out exercising helps kick-start your metabolism so now I go to the gym two or three times a week and I walk a lot. I've kept those 12 lbs off but I realize I can't eat in my 50s the way I used to eat. Those pounds have a way of catching up with you if you don't watch out.
Who Says Americans Are Too Fat?
Overselling the obesity epidemic isn't getting us anywhere. You can be big and healthy at the same time.
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In late June the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched its LEAN Works Web site, a clearinghouse of information on the health costs of employing fat people replete with recommendations on how to prevent and control obesity. The site uses an "obesity cost calculator" to determine the added price of employing somebody with a body-mass index (BMI) of over 30, the threshold for obesity. The calculator asks employers to fill out a company profile including type of industry and location, employees' BMIs, and their wages and benefits. The software then estimates the "costs for medical expenditures and the dollar value of increased absenteeism resulting from obesity."
But is the federal government's endorsement of a device that essentially demonizes the 72 million Americans who fit the official definition of obese justified by the science? Dr. William Dietz, director of the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, defends the site as one weapon in the larger war on fat. "We see this epidemic as a serious threat to health and serious medical cost," Dietz says. "We didn't feel like we could wait for the best possible evidence, so we acted on the best available evidence."
Other experts, however, say BMI is a crude tool that fans fears of an obesity epidemic even as it fails as a reliable measure of an individual's health. "We made everyone fat by framing! That is the real epidemic," says Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado who coauthored a controversial study questioning whether obesity is a true health crisis or a moral panic.
The American Heart Association lists obesity as major risk factor for heart disease because it raises blood pressure, increases "bad" cholesterol while lowering "good" cholesterol, and carries an elevated risk of developing diabetes, itself a risk factor for heart disease. In addition, obesity has been linked to a wide range of health problems, including cancer, asthma, and sleep apnea.
Nevertheless, it's hardly clear that there actually is an obesity epidemic, or that fat people are at greater risk of death than people of normal weight, or that weight loss—relentlessly promoted by public-health officials as the solution to America's weight problem—is an attainable goal at all.
When we talk about the obesity epidemic, it's important to understand where the numbers come from. Most large-scale evaluations of public fatness—including the CDC's—employ BMI, a calculation that uses an
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