Obesity

Obesity?

Obesity is bodyweight in excess to biological needs; excessive fatness. Obesity does not imply a couple pounds over the average; it refers to a large amount of body fat making the individual very overweight. According to WHO (world health organization), obesity is an epidemic concerning over 300 million people around the world with the western nations topping the list. As the years go by, the larger the numbers of obesity and the younger the victims become. Obesity has brought about hundreds of millions of deaths in America and is one of the leading causes to many chronic diseases, and could itself be considered a long-term disease.

How do you know if you're obese?

Obesity today is calculated using the BMI system. The Body Mass Index system provides the individual with certain classifications of body weight: underweight, normal weight (grade 0), overweight (grade 1), slightly obese (grade 2), and severely obese (grade 3).

The BMI classification is attained by dividing the individual's weight in kilograms by the square of his height in meters.

The body mass classifications are defined as follows:

Less than 20 Underweight

20 - 24.9 'Normal' weight (Grade 0)

25 - 29.9 Overweight/'plump' (Grade I)

30 - 40 Moderately obese (Grade II)

More than 40 Severely obese (Grade III)

Table taken from *

This system, however, is not extremely accurate as it does not measure the individual's bodyweight. Take note that muscle is heavier than fat and some very built people might fall under the obese classification.

To accurately determine if you are obese or not, you should calculate your body fat percentage. Calculating this will tell you the mass of the fat in your body relative to your total body mass.

Here are the classifications of body fat percentage:

http://www.virilplant.com/body-fat-understanding.htm

Causes?

"obese" comes from the Latin word "obesus" which means "grown fat by eating". The origin of the word is extremely accurate when it suggests that the main cause of obesity is over-eating.

Many believe that obesity is hereditary, but this is false. Obesity