Why a Program of Moderate and Healthy Weight Loss Can Extend Your Life

All medical studies that I am aware of show that being extremely overweight or obese causes a host of medical problems and greatly reduces your life span. When it comes to the medical benefits of moderate healthy weight loss, however, there appears to be many different opinions. Some claim that being mildly overweight does tax the body and therefore does affect life span. Others claim that that there are no medical issues with being moderately overweight, and that there may actually be benefits to having a little bit of extra fat around your middle. Which to believe?

Although it would be nice to believe that being a little overweight does not have any serious medical consequences, the reality is something different. At least, that is what JoAnn Manson, an MD at the Harvard School of Public Health concluded. She reviewed 25 major studies dealing with the effects of obesity on health, and concluded that being mildly overweight does indeed tax the body. She found that those studies that purported to demonstrate that there was nothing detrimental about being a little overweight were guilty of 3 biases. Here is what she found.

Some studies found that the risk of death was the highest among the thinnest members of the population. The problem with this is that many of these studies didn't take into account that most of this thin people who were dying were smokers. The fact of the matter is that smoking does boost your metabolic rate and it does interfere with your calorie storage. However, these mild benefits are more than offset by the fact that smoking kills you. So, being skinny didn't cause the high mortality rate in these studies, smoking was the cause.

There was another problem with the studies that found that thin people had a higher mortality rate than those who were mildly overweight. This was the fact that when people get sick with a serious illness, they typically lose a lot of weight. For example, someone with cancer might be undergoing chemotherapy and therefore can't eat. In this case, being thin was a harbinger of an early death, not the cause.

The third bias that some of these studies showed was in being too zealous in weeding out factors in an attempt to fairly compare the lean and overweight groups. For example, individuals who had high blood pressure, diabetes, or high blood fat levels would not be included in the analyzed sample groups. The problem with this is that being overweight is often a leading cause of these health issues. Not including them in the samples significantly reduced the risks of premature death from being overweight.

So, once JoAnn had gone through the numbers again taking into account the above 3 factors, what did she find? What she learned was that being mildly or moderately overweight DOES tax your body and DOES SIGNIFICANTLY reduce your life expectancy. She found that the risk of death within 26 years increases by 2 percent for each extra pound between the ages of 50 and 62. It increases by 1 percent for those who are between 30 and 49. Put another way, if you are 50 pounds overweight, you are 50 to 100 percent more likely to die in the next 26 years. You are at twice the risk of dying as someone who is at their ideal weight, and you will lose between 5 and 10 years of your life. From this, we can safely conclude that there are serious benefits to maintaining a healthy weight, or embarking on a healthy weight loss plan if needed.

David Nordmark has long had an interest in natural fitness and health techniques. He runs the website http://www.easyweightloss.breathingweightloss.com/