What?
A person has traditionally been considered to be obese if they are more than 20 percent over their ideal weight. Your body mass index (BMI) is a yardstick derived from the computation of your weight related to your height. The BMI (body mass index), a key index for relating body weight to height, is a person's weight in kilograms (kg) divided by their height in meters (m) squared. Obesity is often multifactorial, based on both genetic and behavioral factors. Accordingly, treatment of obesity usually requires more than just dietary changes. Being overweight is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 25.0 to 29.9. Obesity is defined as having BMI of 30.0 or above
Did you know?
Obesity is an epidemic in the Americas and Europe. Reports suggest that over 6 – 8 percent of the population in India is obese and the numbers are growing thanks to fast food, change in lifestyle and sedentary habits among other factors.
How & Why
Obesity is believed to be an outcome of certain interaction between our genes and the environment. While overweight is defined as ‘abnormally high body weight due to excessive accumulation of body fat’, there are certain ethnic differences in the distribution of subcutaneous fat. Yet, the general cause of the disorder is plain overeating. Besides this, excess weight may also result from abnormal retention of water, bizarre muscular development, or some tumors, including a few endocrinal disorders.
• Excess weight is a global epidemic, a disease, a sign of illness – a complex syndrome.
• New research implicated genetic, emotional, metabolic, sociological, and environmental factors as causative mechanisms
• Excess weight also has a predisposition in children. Some endocrinologists suggest that he heredity aspect may not be largely congenital (present at birth), although eventual overweight, or excess weight, may be a direct consequence of ‘the clean plate syndrome’, a rule which some mothers insist their children follow
• Life expectancy of overweight individuals, after the age of 35, is often associated with a death rate much higher than that of people with normal weight
• While increased body weight places a greater load other circulatory system, regulation of body temperature is affected as well, due to reduced heat insulating effect. This, in turn, brings on profuse sweating and also a host of serious illness – from heart disease to diabetes.
• For some women, pregnancy is a major risk factor. Unlike before, underactive thyroid glands (hypothyroidism) are no longer implicated as a trigger for obesity, since most obese individuals treated for hypothyroidism do not generally shed their excess flab or body weight.
• A sedentary lifestyle with lack of exercise and an uncontrollable urge to feast on food is a major factor for obesity. Regular physical exercise not only increases energy, it also helps control the appetite and the urge to eat.
Overweight women are often vulnerable to urinary incontinence, irregular menstrual cycles, and infertility.
Symptoms & Diagnosis
Obesity occurs gradually, over a period of time. When you gain weight, you will notice that your clothes feel tight and no longer fit you like they did before. It is easy to find out if one is overweight or obese, by measuring your waist circumference and calculating your BMI. Likewise, your waste-to-hip ratio helps to determine your risk of heart disease. How is this done? First, measure your waist circumference and divide it by your circumference.
Men, who have a ratio greater than 1.0, and women, with a ratio greater than 0.8, are at the highest risk for heart disease and heart failure. For women, the risk for diabetes increases when their waist is more than 35 inches. For men, the risk increases when their waist is more than 40 inches.
Diagnosis :-
• Your doctor can diagnose your condition by using several parameters, beginning with a physical examination. This will include weight and height measurements to calculate your BMI, besides your detailed medical history, your family’s health background, your dietary and exercise habits, your smoking and nicotine intake, alcohol use or abuse, as well as earlier attempts at losing weight.
• They may also order blood tests to check your fating glucose, cholesterol. Triglycerides levels, apart from other obesity-related illness, or syndromes.
Self – help :-
• Don’t skip your breakfast. A good breakfast jumpstarts your metabolism , allowing you to burn more calories during the day
• Mix proteins with complex carbohydrates. This will ensure that you get a steady flow of energy as the body converts food relatively slowly to glucose. This also prevents excess insulin production and minimalizes the potential of your body to store food as fat. Example: lentils, legumes, milk, egg, meat, fish. Complex carbohydrates are rice, oats, whole wheat, jower, ragi, and bajra.
• Drink plenty of water, at least 2.5 liters a day and even more in hot weather, or if you are exercising. This will help replenish your fluids levels and prevent dehydration.
• Limit things that lead to dehydration , alcohol, tea , coffee
• Follow 80:20 principle , eat healthy 80 % of the time , so you can eat tempting foods 20% of the time
• Exercise: walking is the best physical activity. it burns your calories
• Avoid watching T.V. while having food; the diverted concentration automatically makes you to over eat.
• Implement good habits in children right at the early years.
Healing with Homeopathy
International clinical trials have shown that homeopathic remedies act as fat burners in overweight individuals. They also stimulate and hasten the body’s metabolic rate and, therefore, help lose weight, without side-effects.
I strongly believe that cut down calorie intake, increasing physical activities, and taking constitutional homeopathic medicine continually will cause losing extra weight and maintenance... Homeopathic specific remedies for weight loss such as Phytolacca Berry or Fucus Vesiculosus can be tried in mother tincture 5 drops two times a day before meal for 10 days.
Case :- Patient named Vinutha (40) came with the complaints of pain in the knee joints.
Her weight had increased recently due to change in life style and diet habits. Currently she weighed 85 kg. She had severe pain in the left knee joint which increased on first movement, stepping up and in the night .She had difficulty in going into sleep, wouldn’t get sleep till 1 A.M. She had recurrent dreams of snake, taking into consideration her general symptoms she was prescribed Lachesis. She showed remarkable changes in her symptoms. Her weight reduced by 5 kg in the course of 4 -5 months. Her joint pains started reducing in the course of treatment. She was left behind with serenity and hopes to cure her completely.
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