Carefree yet Careful – Control on Obesity

Obesity rates are escalating. Statistic cause major alarm as the percentage of overweight and obese children and adolescents has doubled in the last two decades. Can it be controlled?

Statistics may not be, but indirectly, individual persons can. Control on obesity could be answered by personal conviction – a devotion to one’s wellbeing. Yet how?

Statistics also show that most people are unaware of the basic nutritional needs and limitations required for their consumption. This may be the key.

Control on obesity is possible by controlling one’s eating habits. Only about 2,000 calories a day should be consumed by women and 2,500 for men. Eating beyond these amounts would oblige them to have an additional activity control on obesity. So that’s it – don’t eat beyond what your body can burn off, otherwise pump up your muscles an extra mile.

Standards recognize people who have sedentary lifestyles. There’s nothing wrong with being deskbound. What’s wrong is when their energy intake is not balanced (greater) with their activity output. On the other hand, people with very active lifestyles like athletes or manual laborers require more caloric intake. And compared to women who are neither pregnant nor nursing, pregnant and/or nursing mothers need more calories per day than usual. If you’re not under these categories then perhaps you should start counting your spoonfuls, or your reps. Remember that excess protein or carbohydrate intake is converted to fat for storage. And one pound of fat represents about 3,500 excess calories. So watch the scale – an extra pound could mean multiple tons of immediate control on obesity, before anything else slips off hand.

Once you get a control on your caloric balance then you may no longer have to engage in a dubious control on obesity. To approximately determine your caloric needs, you can compute for your Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR. More serious control on obesity deals with BMI, but in the case of a preventive control on obesity, you can easily compute for your BMR.

The BMR determines the number of calories that your body needs in order to maintain its basic functions as well as to sustain or regulate your current weight (or calorie-intake). To compute for your BMR, just take your current weight in pounds and multiply it by 10. If you are on a standard activity level and weigh 180-lbs. then you only need 1,800 calories a day! – There’s absolutely no need to worry that your body isn’t getting enough ‘nutrition’!