STOP using weight to assess health (get married instead!)
We are a culture obsessed with what people weigh!
Weight is a risk factor for many preventable diseases but it doesn’t mean that slim people are necessarily healthy!
BMI is a nonsense measure, yet still used by our health care professionals as an assessment of health. If you are very muscular you could have a high BMI as muscle is more dense.
Weight also does not indicate the high risk visceral fat held in a body.
We did a bit of Googling to get some perspective on these risk factors and how they affect our behaviour.
An Oxford study linked marriage with reduced risk of heart disease. But no one has ever judged Coach Sall on not being married and the strain she might be putting on the NHS, so stop judging people on their weight for that same reason!
Be cautious when you are reading these kind of articles! It’s not about the losing weight - it’s about the lifestyle.
A CNN article reported a reduced risk of dementia if you are married, but an increase for widows. The difference was the lifestyle factors.
The message that has to be got across is that your weight is a combination of lifestyle factors.
We talk about this Harvard Health article "When dieting doesn’t work".
This is what happens in real life - you go to the doctor, they tell you you are high risk and overweight, the final straw so you go home and decide to lose weight. You get great results after 6 months, but after 12 months, worse than disappointing, in fact, back to where you started.
So, weight might be a risk factor, but a bigger risk factor are lifestyle factors, dieting doesn’t work because it brings about temporary changes. It has to be about changes you can sustain.
You can be fit and healthy even if you are overweight!
And, if you make all those changes and it doesn’t reduce your weight, you are getting healthier. But if you diet to lose weight and don’t make those other changes, you might lose weight, but not necessarily getting healthier. In fact, could be a negative impact on your health!
Other episodes we mention you might like to listen to;
Drop Your BMI Like a Piece of Rubbish
Reasons to exercise (that aren’t about how you look or what you weigh)
