Weight Maintenance Problem?

With the Epidemic of obesity constantly rising in the world, and it is hitting the world, there isn’t a part of the world that hasn’t got a rising case of obesity.

As usual, it is generally the poorest or those on lower income that are seeing the biggest rises.

It is estimated that by 2035 which in the grand scheme of things isn’t that far away, if you think back to 2010 it only feels like yesterday but was 14 years ago, time flies so this will turn up very quickly indeed, anyway as I was saying, it is estimated that by 2035 the levels of obesity in adults will rise from 0.88 billion to 1.53 billion.

1.53 billion adults in the world are expected to be obese.

That doesn’t consider Kids.

A vast majority of those adults and kids will come from Low to middle Income Countries.

We must ask what the issue is.

Is it a weight loss issue?

Do we have an issue with losing weight?

Or is it just really a weight maintenance issue?

We can all lose weight if we want to, that comes down to whether the person wants, the weight loss industry is a huge profitable industry and last year was expected to be worth $299 Billion and is expected to be worth $415 Billion by 2027.

This is huge, absolutely bloody huge, you can’t even really picture it.

People are making a fortune from this.

So, is weight loss an issue?

Not as people continue to spend a fortune on it.

The issue is keeping it off.

This is where we need to look at why this is an issue.

One of the easiest and simple facts of this is that we currently live in a time where food is so easily available for all, we have an abundance of food at our fingertips, no matter the time of year, we can in effect get anything and everything we want.

Also, it doesn’t matter what time of day, we have at our fingertips, especially in developed countries the ability just to open our phones and food will be with you within minutes.

Where do we start then to work out what the issue is?

Firstly, we do need to consider that there isn’t much money to be made from people being healthy for a lot of companies and people running these companies.

A lot of these companies wouldn’t exist if people were healthy.

Would big pharma and insurance companies be as big as they are if people weren’t being given a load of medication for lifestyle diseases and would insurance companies be as big if they didn’t continue to charge a fuck tonne of money for medical insurance.

Does it come down to education?

There is that, of course, people don’t get portion control, now is because there is more food available now, whereas in the past as humans we had to make things last, if you brought something in from shopping it had to make do for a couple of meals so was spread out, but now with things being the way they are, we tend to make things up for one meal at a time and use it all.

Do we understand the benefits of eating a predominantly plant-based diet, now I don’t mean vegan here, I wouldn’t say I like the term plant-based diet being linked with being vegan, I think all diets should be based around the following, protein and veg.

After that then you get the other stuff like rice and pasta.

I don’t think we do, or we do but then it comes down to the following.

Convenience

Cost

To eat healthily isn’t very cheap, the cost of eating veg, etc does mean your weekly shopping cost will go up and for a lot of people this is a big issue.

Right now it is tough for people and when you have a family to feed on a very small budget the choice between buying up a load of healthy food that may last a couple of meals etc or buying up a load of cheap frozen products with very little nutritional value is a no brainer, because when it comes down to it, food is just food and something is better than nothing.

This is a big issue, we have companies that are mass-producing food and knocking it out very cheaply, ready-made or just need to stick it in the oven, the problem with half of this is it’s very calorie dense, which means it is very easy to over consume your calories for the day.

All of that alongside the fact as a species we move a lot less than we ever have, we don’t have jobs where we physically are moving about as much as we were, now a lot of people spend a lot of time just sitting at a desk staring at a screen, finishing that and going to do the same just with a bigger screen.

The combination of easily available cheap calorie-dense food and our ability to sit around doing nothing for a lot of the day means that maintaining our weight becomes harder and harder.

The hard thing isn’t losing the weight it’s maintaining that loss and continuing to do what you were doing to get rid of it.

Moving more daily, eating better food choices, and potentially batch cooking so things are not being wasted.

Maintaining our weight has to be something that you aim for, not focusing on just constantly losing weight, putting it back on again, and losing it again but if you have weight to lose then focusing on those little habit changes, those lifestyle changes to keep it off is key.

How does this affect the world though given the fact there really isn’t money in making people healthy.

This is where trying to bring everyone up together, takes people from being poor and constantly worried about having to put food on the table for their kids and making sure it’s good for them.

How do we do that?

This is where the likes of UBI (Universal Basic Income) comes in, I won’t go into it here and my views on it but, allowing people to have their basic needs covered will mean so much for everyone and everything, it would also in the long run bring the health service back up because we won’t be having to spend so much money on lifestyle diseases.

Is this idea of trying to fix a weight maintenance issue a quick fix?

Nope, of course not unlike all these promises from fad diets that ultimately push you back to where you currently are, this is something that needs to be worked on not just at an individual level but a national and international level, a whole adjustment to the way we live our lives needs to be assessed.

However, I guess whilst there are still multi-national huge companies making a fuck tonne of money for their shareholders and board members out of people being sick and obese instead of trying to think about the future of our species then it may take longer than I hope it will.

So, in the meantime, I guess people like myself who are in the industry just need to try to continue to educate people on how to maintain and not feel like life is shit when you do.

We can just continue to try to make a difference in a space where sometimes it can feel like you’re using a bucket to empty a sinking ship whilst the water continues to flood in.

That sounds more depressing than it should, but we can just continue to make a difference to one person a day and hopefully, over time those in power will step up and make a difference to the world instead of just to their bank accounts.


Tags

fitness, Health, The Fox Den, wokingham, Wokingham gym


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