Maintaining a good healthy lifestyle is essentials, by eating healthy, exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy weight, and avoiding alcohol and tobacco. Nutrition plays a major role in order to control obesity in individuals. Intake of a healthy diet is very important to reduce obesity, preventing, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and osteoporosis.
It needs to be remembered that nutrition has a much broader role to play in health promotion. An optimal intake of protein, vitamins, and minerals is needed to provide for growth of children, successful pregnancies and breast feeding experiences, and good health and well-being for all adults, including senior citizens.
Maintain a Healthy Weight
Maintaining an ideal weight throughout life has been called the single most important nutritional challenge facing many people today. Maintaining a normal body weight reduces the risks of illness and death from heart disease, diabetes and other diseases. In addition, complications associated with degenerative arthritis and gout are more serious when one is overweight, and the hazards of surgery, pregnancy, and childbirth are also higher in the obese.
Studies have shown a higher incidence of cancer among obese persons, particularly cancer of the gall bladder and kidney. Furthermore, some studies have shown an increased incidence of breast and uterus cancer in obese than in lean women and increased incidence of prostate and colon cancer in obese than in lean men. Although most researchers do not favour severely restricting calories as a method of reducing the risk of cancer in humans. Achieving and maintaining an ideal body weight is well advised.
In addition to health reasons, many formerly overweight individuals cite increased self-confidence, reduced fatigue, improved physical appearance, and greater ease of movement as sufficient reasons for taking off and keeping off extra pounds.
Health Risk of Obesity
Recent studies indicate that the health risk of obesity varies with the location of fat distribution. Excessive fat deposited in the abdominal region is more likely to be a risk for subsequent heart disease. Than is fat deposited in the upper arms or thighs. Fat deposition is typical of middle-aged men and is commonly referred to as ”executive spread” or a “beer belly.”
Overweight men are at higher risk of heart disease than are women with the same level of overweight. In fact, a high waist-to-hip ratio predicts an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes in both sexes. Fat deposited over the shoulder blades, was shown to be a predictor of coronary heart disease in men.
