Did you know that people who are overweight or obese often have health problems that may increase the risk for heart disease?
These health problems include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high blood sugar. In addition, excess weight may cause changes to your heart that make it work harder to send blood to all the cells in your body.
Having a large body size may increase blood pressure because your heart needs to pump harder to supply blood to all your cells. Excess fat may also damage your kidneys, which help regulate blood pressure.
Because carrying extra weight increases the stress on the body’s organs and processes, including how much blood the body needs and how
hard the cardiovascular system needs to work, morbid obesity increases the likelihood of developing heart disease by as much as six times compared to people who maintain a healthy weight. It also ups the risk of sudden death from heart disease-related complications,
such as abnormal heart rhythms, by as much as 40 per cent.
Losing even small amounts of weight can boost health in more ways than one. Research has shown that reducing total body weight by just 5 per cent can have substantial health benefits such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. While continued weight loss towards a healthy body weight should always be the end goal, these small milestones should be celebrated along the way for their positive impacts on health.
We know that modest weight loss reduces the risk of heart disease and our free guide below provides good advice on how to achieve that modest weight reduction. Recent advice is suggesting that people forget about being ‘skinny’, and accept that even relatively small amounts of weight can positively impact our weight. This is reassuring to many who find the idea of weight loss overwhelming, especially those who feel that they have a significant amount to lose.
Click here to download a free copy of How Even Modest Weight Loss Can Boost Your Health.
