Your weight can affect all parts of your life. The negative impacts of obesity can be noticed in your everyday life, health, and how long you will live. It also impacts your quality of life, finances, and, in extreme cases, your relationships.
Carrying extra weight also leads to life-threatening medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke), type 2 diabetes, skeletal disorders, and some cancers.
All these conditions can shorten one’s life span and reduce quality of life. Let’s discuss the various causes of obesity and how it alters your lifestyle negatively.
What is Obesity, and Why is It a Problem?
Obesity, as defined by the circles of medicine, is a complex disease involving having too much body fat. However, it isn’t just a cosmetics concern. It’s a medical problem that makes you vulnerable to many other diseases and health problems.
There are many obstacles to losing weight, so many people don’t find the motivation to overcome obesity. Often, obesity exists due to inherited, physiological, and environmental reasons.
Combined with dietary habits, physical activity levels, and exercise choices, it can get worse. Therefore, it’s crucial to fight obesity with physical exertion and medication.
There are plenty of medications that help you control obesity. These include long-term therapy-based medications, like the prescribed injectable medication like Zepbound.
10 Ways Obesity Impacts Your Health
Carrying extra weight with you has a cost you must pay for your health. From a complex web of health issues caused by obesity, we have enlisted the top 10 most crucial ones that can motivate you to beat obesity.
1. Type 2 Diabetes
Obesity is a major risk factor for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Excess (body fat) can interfere with your body’s insulin action, leading to elevated blood sugar levels.
The resistance within your cells means you need more insulin to stabilize blood sugar levels. Hence, over time, the pancreas that creates insulin struggles to keep up with the higher demand, and you get type 2 diabetes.
2. Cardiovascular Disease
Cardiovascular disease refers to conditions that affect the heart and blood vessels. Extra weight around the abdomen can lead to many conditions, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, insulin resistance and diabetes, coronary artery diseases, heart failure, and stroke.
3. Hypertension
Hypertension tension is another health concern that becomes serious when combined with obesity.
Hypertension (high blood pressure) results in an alteration in blood levels. It may be increased blood volume, narrowing of blood vessels, disruption of hormones that regulate blood levels, insulin resistance, blood vessel inflammation, etc.
Disruption of these dynamics can raise blood pressure to alarmingly dangerous levels, which can put additional stress on the heart and other organs.
4. Respiratory Problems
Obesity can result in health conditions that affect your respiratory system. Unnecessary body weight around your neck can disrupt your breathing while lying down, making breathing hard.
Another health condition obesity brings with it is asthma. Excess weight can restrict lung expansion, making breathing harder, especially during physical activity.
Moreover, excess body weight can weaken your body’s immune system, making you vulnerable to respiratory infections such as pneumonia and influenza. Hence, it deprives you of a healthy respiratory system and makes physical activity an uphill climb.
5. Liver Disease
The liver is a crucial organ responsible for regulating sugar in your body. Excess body weight can result in a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver. This is a common liver disorder associated with obesity. It refers to excess fat buildup on the liver that’s not caused by alcohol. Moreover, obesity can increase the risk of liver cancer. This is due to inflammation, enlargement, and unnecessary pressure buildup on the liver due to excess body weight. A damaged liver also leads to other medical conditions as it is less efficient in removing toxins from your blood which can then move to other organs and damage their functionality.
6. Kidney Disease
Kidneys are one of the most sensitive organs in your body. Obesity is a risk factor for chronic kidney disease where your kidneys gradually lose their ability to function over time. Excess weight can put additional pressure on the kidneys, leading to damage to kidney tissues that are essential for proper working. Kidneys are also damaged due to higher blood sugar levels when combined with type 2 diabetes. Additionally, kidneys have delicate blood vessels that can be damaged due to constriction and obesity. Another harmful kidney condition is the formation of kidney stones. The changes in the metabolism of your body due to obesity can lead to higher levels of certain substances in the urine, hence building kidney stones.
7. Skeletal and Muscular Damage
Obesity means more weight, and the structure carrying that weight is your skeleton and muscles. Just like any structure subjected to excessive weight, your bones and muscles tend to shrink and weaken due to additional weight caused by obesity.
In medical terms, it’s called loss of bone density. This condition will result in random fractures due to weak bones, frequent muscle sprains, joint pains, and, most importantly, poor knee health.
8. Social Insecurities
As obvious as it sounds, people with obesity tend to have insecurities about their bodies and might even get fat-shamed by society. This can result in additional mental stress.
Combined with physical health challenges, your deteriorating mental health does not help in living a healthy life. Ultimately, it can alter your behaviors permanently and affect your personal relationships, working habits, confidence, and, most importantly, your self-esteem.
9. Economic Impact
Obesity comes with a burden on your pocket. It’s estimated that the annual obesity-related medical care costs in the US were $173 billion in 2019. Besides these, direct medical costs include preventive, diagnostic, and treatment services that become a burden on your finances.
A very silent but detrimental cost of obesity comes from low productivity.
As per a report published in 2019, absences from work and offices in the US due to obesity-related health conditions have soared and caused an economic loss of around $3.38 billion. Hence, obesity negatively affects the national economy and productivity in various fields.
10. Poor Quality of Life
Let’s face it: extremely obese people can’t go hiking. But it doesn’t stop at that. As someone who suffers from obesity, you will mostly find yourself sitting static in one place while your friends go on a hike, do a water fight, or simply participate in a 100m sprint race.
Not only do you suffer from health conditions, but you can’t enjoy life or make memories with your friends that require physical exertion.
This can also impact your mental health in the long term and develop feelings of being left out or missing out on creating happy moments with your loved ones.
The Bottom Line
Obesity is one of the most worrying health conditions for medical doctors around the globe. Millions of people suffer from direct or indirect consequences of obesity.
Not only is obesity detrimental to physical and mental health, but it also has a large impact on the national economy, your general lifestyle, and your personal relationships.
Hence, it’s crucial to fight the curse of obesity with physical exertion, medication, and a change of lifestyle to avoid shortening your life span and quality of life.