Saturday, February 16, 2019

Fatness versus fitness: which matters more?


Numerous studies have looked at fitness and obesity as two separate elements because they are apparently separate ideas: one measures how well your lungs and heart work to supply oxygen to your muscles while the other is a proportion of your body height and weight. However, the measures of fitness and fatness are both influenced by how much you weigh.

Likewise, what researchers mean by fatness is really body mass index (BMI), a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Strictly speaking, obesity doesn’t mean you are automatically unfit. There are fat people who run every day, and then there are thin people who couldn’t run a mile for their life. A muscular individual can also be considered obese, because muscle weighs over fat, and be very fit.

But these are exceptions, not the rule. Studies demonstrate that when someone is considered as obese, the probability of them being fit is very low. So in our society, being fat still generally means lower fitness.

Fatness makes it harder to enhance fitness

For people who are obese, concentrating on losing weight is a better place to start than just focusing on fitness. That is as a result of extra weight can make it harder to move, and thus harder to exercise. Obese people typically have a difficult time doing physical activity due to limited mobility, body size and joint pain.

Physiologically, it’s harder for an obese individual to do the same amount of exercise as a healthy weight individual because of the extra weight they carry. Heavier individuals need more oxygen to do the same exercise as a healthy weight person. Some obese individuals report that even walking can seem difficult. Fitness is just harder to achieve if you can’t move effectively.

Fatness reduces the quality of life

The debate around fitness and fatness centres on studies that show that compared to normal weight-fit individuals, unfit individuals had twice the risk of mortality regardless of BMI. But as these studies show, a relatively small proportion of people are fit and obese.

But mortality is not the only issue. Obesity has been shown to predict heart disease, liver disease, diabetes and a whole host of health problems that will need taking daily pills or having daily injections or result in invasive procedures. Even if a higher BMI does not predict earlier death, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter to your health.

Increasing physical activity while not losing weight won't probably improve these patients’ lives. To enhance their health and quality of life, it is important to exercise every day, eat healthy food and most importantly lose some weight.

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