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Fatty Standards

Fatty Standards Today’s children are faced with a severe epidemic. Day after day, children are growing in size. The number of obese children is growing severely and scientists are perplexed. Obesity is a disease affecting thousands of people every day. While conducting my research, the argument that I found was most prominent was the debate between whether obese individuals should become fit vs. just losing weight. Most articles I found continued to say that obese people need to lose weight to reduce their chances of being affected by certain diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and heart attacks. In the first article I read which I gathered from the NAAFA (National Association for Advanced Fat Acceptance) argues that obese individuals do not need to lose weight to cure their “disease”. The NAAFA argues that obese patients can become physically fit without having to lose all the weight. Naturally when individuals become physically active and on their way to becoming physically fit, they lose weight, but what the NAAFA is arguing is that obese individuals shouldn’t focus on just losing the weight to make their life better, they should focus on making their lifestyle habits more physically active and health conscious. This article also talks about the research done on obesity and its faults. NAAFA says that the obese research community makes hypotheses that are biased against fat people. Very-low-calorie diets are said to be unhealthy and that most research is focused on these types of diets and the weight loss caused by these. Weight is loss, but then regained and leads to an early death. This is said to prove that being fat is unhealthy, but the article states that in reality the VLC diets are what’s bad for individuals. The article I gathered from the NAAFA is very set in it’s opinion of how obesity should be handled. This organization seems to have a very one-sided outlook on all the research being done. It seems to be implying that being overweight is okay and as long as you are “fit” you can be overweight. On the other end of the spectrum, I found an article talking about the complications related to obesity. In this article, which I gathered from Weight.com, it lists all the problems associated with obesity and some things that can be done to help fix or even prevent these complications. One thing that I found prevalent among these “cures” and “preventions” was the fact that weight needed to be lost. The article speaks that in most cases among hypertension, diabetes, degenerative arthritis, elevated cholesterol, and sleep disorders associated with obesity, a 10% loss in body fat would help prevent these health problems. This article was written by a doctor who has been doing studies and helping obese individuals since 1980. He states that the weight needs to be loss before an individual can become physically fit. I think the simple point he is implying, is that unlike the other article, an obese individual needs to lose the weight in order to be physically fit. Both articles have good points in each but I think the underlying point that needs to be addressed is whether or not the weight needs to be lost. According to BMI scales, the weight needs to be lost but these standards are also not true for everyone. Athletes for example have a higher BMI than most because of muscle content. Also, when we speak of losing the “weight”, I think both articles are speaking of losing fat, not just weight. Many people become obsessed with losing the weight and that leads to other complications such as malnourishment, and eating disorders. What we need to find is a healthy median between the two arguments. Being an exercise science major, we have to study topics such as obesity and although I can see both sides of each argument, I don’t completely agree with each. On one hand, in the article from NAAFA, I agree that some research may seem biased and that researchers do need to realize that obesity is not just a biological/physical disease. Obesity affects a person psychologically, socially, culturally, and politically, as well as just physically. Treatments for this disease should be non-biased and encouraging. I’ve seen many weight-loss gimmicks so far and it seems to me that it only brings people’s hopes down because the diets fail and then their disease seems impossible to cure. In the first article, it states, “permanent weight loss is impossible to achieve, that dieting makes them fatter, that many of them are healthy, and that valuing thinness over fatness is a cultural bias.” I believe valuing thinness over fatness is a cultural bias and I blame the media in part for that. Now a days, all we see on the television is images of models with the ideal body and it makes many of us sad because we have tried to reach those goals, and cannot. In reality only a very small percentage of people look like those models, and those are the models themselves. I believe that before a doctor can begin to cure someone with obesity, they have to start in the psychological department before they can focus on having the person lose weight. Just as in an addiction, the person had to be able to see their goals and believe they can reach those goals. The person has to be convinced that the change they have to make is for the bettering of their life. Since we cannot change our culture, we have to change the attitudes of each individual. The person needs to see that they are beautiful regardless of what they look like, but that they need to lose the fat for health reasons. Obese individuals, often, do not know just how bad things can get until it’s too late and they are facing some of the many complications that were mentioned in article two. One thing I realized about both articles is the underlying fact that something needs to be changed in the lives of obese individuals. The difference in the two articles, though, is how this change should take place. Some researchers like VLC diets, but I’ll agree with article one in saying that I believe diets are bad for you. Diets are temporary and many times when people diet, when they go off the diet, they gain the weight back. It’s a never-ending cycle with diets. The change that needs to happen when it comes to the nutrition and food aspect of losing fat and becoming physically fit is changing how you eat completely. It helps to just eat healthy foods and not limit yourself to only being able to eat certain foods. As long as you live an active life and you burn more calories than you consume in a day, you can get rid of the fatty weight and maintain a healthy body composition. Exercise should be a daily part of anyone’s life because it helps burn the calories you don’t need and it helps strengthen certain muscles and organs that are beneficial to life. If you mix eating properly and not dieting, exercising regularly, and taking care of your body with regular check ups, you can become physically fit faster than you think. Obese individuals are no different and when article one said that permanent weight loss is impossible to achieve, I disagree because if you take the proper routes to becoming physically fit, permanent weight loss is attainable. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1250