There’s a good reason why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has labeled obesity as both an epidemic and a crisis — two-thirds of all adults in the United States are carrying too much weight, leaving them more vulnerable to some serious, and even life-threatening, health issues.
As heart-health experts, Dr. Madaiah Revana and our team at Humble Cardiology Associates have seen our fair share of weight-related cardiovascular issues, and we want to raise awareness of this significant threat.
Rather than listing all of the health conditions that are linked to obesity or being overweight, we thought we’d take a more positive approach by explaining four great health benefits of losing weight.
Before we dive into four specific health benefits of weight loss, we want to emphasize that weight loss isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition.
Not only can breaking weight loss down into smaller, more achievable steps garner more success, the CDC reports that losing just 5-10% of your overall body weight can improve your health significantly. For example, losing 5-10% of your total body weight can lower your blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and blood sugar levels.
As cardiologists, we want to focus on four health benefits that directly affect your cardiovascular health. We already reported above that losing just 5-10% of your body weight can lower your blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, but now we want to dive a little deeper into why these reductions are meaningful.
When you carry too much weight, it’s likely that your diet may be full of unhealthy foods that can lead to narrowing in your blood vessels. With this fatty buildup in your blood vessels, your blood is forced to travel through increasingly smaller spaces, which places pressure on the blood vessel walls.
When you embark on our customized weight-loss program, we show you how to avoid unhealthy foods, which can reduce your blood pressure and encourage your blood to flow more freely and efficiently.
Your cholesterol numbers include the levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and triglycerides. These numbers are tricky because you want your LDL and triglyceride numbers to be lower, but your HDL numbers to be higher.
One of the best ways to battle elevated cholesterol numbers and strike the right balance is to improve your diet and lose weight. When you remove unhealthy fats and sugary foods from your diet, your cholesterol numbers may reflect these efforts.
When you carry too much weight, you’re at a far greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a condition in which your body becomes resistant to insulin and can’t produce enough of the hormone to overcome the resistance.
This leads to poor regulation of your blood sugar levels, which can have serious consequences, such as heart disease and nerve damage.
Losing weight may help you avoid this type of insulin resistance and a diabetes diagnosis. Even if you’ve already been diagnosed with diabetes, losing weight can help prevent the serious cardiovascular and neurological complications we mentioned above.
One of the keys to losing weight is exercise, but exercise can be difficult if you’re carrying extra weight. When you embark on our weight-loss program, you’ll be amazed to find that with every pound you lose, your ability to exercise will increase.
As the pounds begin to drop away, you can greatly accelerate your weight loss by increasing your exercise. This, in turn, does wonders for your heart health, as exercise can go a very long way toward preventing heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
Of course, there are many more benefits to losing weight, but we feel that the above four illustrate the power of weight loss when it comes to your health. If you want to take charge of your health through our weight-loss program, contact one of our offices in Houston or Humble, Texas, to set up a consultation.
