How And Why Do We Need To Lose Weight

5 significant reasons to lose weight. (Why isn’t the media covering these?)

Avoiding heart disease and looking ‘fab’ aren’t always great reasons to lose weight. However, here are 5 immediate and significant ways your life can change when you trim the fat.

I’d like you to join me in a thought experiment.

I promise there’s a point to it. In fact, we’ll soon talk about why most popular reasons for losing weight are either uninspiring or scientifically worthless.

But, for now, let’s begin by setting our feelings, insecurities, assumptions, stories, and beliefs about body fat aside.

You might feel confused. Or defensive. Or saying “Yes, but…”

Please bear with me. Just for a few minutes.

Forget, for a moment, about looking good.

Forget about “thin privilege”. Forget about “fat privilege”.

Forget about personal rights or civic obligations.

Forget about abs and guns and lats and whatever other laundry list of nonsense is now used to describe various body parts.

While you’re at it, forget about whatever other wretchedness the Internet has spawned this week. (Thigh gap? Duck lips? Bikini bridge? Manscaping?)

So, yeah, forget about body image.

Forget, for a moment, about disease.

Forget about all the big-name medical scares including atherosclerosis, arterial plaque, cardiac arrest, pulmonary hypertension, stroke, all the cancers, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.

And forget about what some randomly chosen biomarker says.

“My glucose tolerance is good. I’m healthy and fat!”

“My triglycerides are low. I’m healthy and thin!”

“My cholesterol is excellent. I’m healthy and jacked!”

For a moment, let all of that go. (More on why in a second).

And, most of all, forget about “health at any size”.

Yes, obese people do have the right to be treated with dignity.

Absolutely and certainly.

And, yes, obese people should be supported in efforts to become more healthy outside of weight loss. As we all know, health isn’t a direct function of your weight.

However, the “health at any size” movement goes one step too far in suggesting that obesity is harmless. That it’s not bad for you. That having excess body fat is of no more consequence than wearing a red sweater or driving a Nissan Sentra.

This is simply not true; it contradicts most of the available evidence.

So, for now, forget a) looking good, b) disease, and c) “health at any size”.

Each of these obscures the real, significant reasons people should consider losing weight.

For example: The mainstream conversation about fatness and health focuses on medical conditions that can kill or disable us. While these make for great headlines, this angle isn’t very compelling.

Why not? Well, imagine that bacon (or broccoli, or some other food) causes a 10 percent increase in some horrible cancer-type disease. Scary, right?

Not when you realize that your chance of dying from that horrible cancer-type thing without bacon (or broccoli) is only 1 in 100,000 (or 0.001 percent). And that a 10 percent increase from eating bacon (or broccoli) means your chance rises to 1.1 in 100,000 (or 0.0011 percent).

Meh.

Since we’re all going to die anyway, medical scare tactics simply don’t come off as scary (especially when you know what the data really mean). Nor do they motivate change.

The fitness industry, of course, takes another approach.

In fitness it’s all about looking great in a certain type of clothing, or on the beach, or at your high school reunion. And while that can seem inspiring for a minute, it’s not proven to be a sustainable way to achieve long-term weight loss and maintenance.

5 GOOD reasons for losing weight.

In the end, the most popular incentives — scary disease statistics and fitness industry vanity trips — aren’t very effective, useful, or scientifically valid ways to promote weight loss.

That’s a huge missed opportunity, because there are much better reasons to lose weight. More pressing, more evidence-based, more quality-of-life focused reasons.

Sadly, they’re not often talked about in the public debate.

(Notice that I said public debate. Scientists and doctors talk about them all the time. They’re well established in research. They just haven’t made it to the public yet).

So let’s talk about them now.

Reason #5: Your knees and elbows will thank you.

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease, in which we lose cartilage and gradually destroy the bones of our joints.

Imagine two rocks grinding together and you get the idea of how fun that is.

In my experience, healthy people don’t think much about osteoarthritis because it’s common. Aging makes it more likely. Everyone’s grandma has a twinge of arthritis.

So we think it’s normal.

This hides the degree to which it can be very unpleasant and debilitating.

Like most chronic illnesses, osteoarthritis is a vicious cycle.

• Your joints hurt, so you move less.
• Moving less means your joints don’t get loaded.
• Less joint loading means muscle weakness.
• Muscle weakness means force doesn’t get cushioned correctly.
• Less cushion means the condition worsens.
• More osteoarthritis means more pain.
• And, onwards, we circle the drain.

The point? Obesity makes it much more likely that you’ll get osteoarthritis.

In one study comparing the heaviest patients to the lightest, the chance of being diagnosed with osteoarthritis in one knee was more than 6 times in the heavy group. For both knees it was almost 18 times.

(Naturally, other studies over the last 20 years have investigated the same relationship. Some estimates are higher, some are lower. But the association between body fat and osteoarthritis has been replicated several times.)

The reason this happens is complicated.

It isn’t just that heavier people put more weight on their joints, and those joints then degrade over time. It’s also that there seems to be a relationship between the presence of excess fat tissue and inflammation.

Thus, osteoarthritis probably comes from a combination of excess joint loading plus the inflammatory chemical and hormonal environment that having too much body fat creates.

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