The link between obesity and your heart health is a strong one — carrying extra weight leads directly to cholesterol imbalances, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. These conditions are not only serious, but they can be life-threatening, which is why you want to do what you can to limit these risks. Given the connection between your weight and your cardiovascular health, one of the best places to start is through weight loss.
At Humble Cardiology Associates, Dr. Madaiah Revana and our team understand how weight can impact your heart health, which is why we offer comprehensive and effective weight-loss services.
To help provide you with a little motivation, we’re going to take a closer look at the risks that come with carrying too much weight. Better still, we discuss how addressing these risks through weight loss can improve your health.
There are several ways that having obesity or being overweight can affect your heart health, including:
When you’re overweight or have obesity, your cholesterol levels can become imbalanced. What we mean by imbalance is that your LDL (the bad cholesterol) and triglyceride levels can go up, while your HDL (the good cholesterol) levels can go down.
Since your body relies on HDL to remove bad cholesterol from your body, the combination of an increase in LDLs and a decrease in HDLs means that your blood has too much cholesterol circulating, and it can build up inside your blood vessels.
When you carry extra weight, your body needs more oxygen, which forces your cardiovascular system to work harder. This extra workload places more pressure on your arterial walls, leading to hypertension.
Obesity is the primary driver of type 2 diabetes — 30-53% of new cases each year in the US are linked with obesity. When you have diabetes, your risks for heart disease grow. To illustrate this point, nearly 70% of people age 65 or older who have diabetes also have heart disease.
There are other ways in which weight can affect your heart health, but these examples paint a fairly clear picture.
When you have obesity, we understand that losing weight can seem like a daunting task. We want to underscore that, when it comes to your heart health, losing just 5-10% of your overall body weight can make a big difference.
As examples, this small amount of weight loss can raise your HDL numbers and lower your LDL levels, creating a better cholesterol balance in your blood. As well, losing 5-10% of your overall weight can also help prevent insulin resistance.
Another benefit of modest weight loss is that your heart and blood vessels don’t have to work as hard to deliver oxygen to your body, which lowers your blood pressure.
Again, the amount of weight loss we’re talking about is highly achievable, and we’re here to help. We offer two different weight-loss programs that can help you get to your goals quickly and safely — Suddenly Slim® and FirstFitness Nutrition®.
If you’d like to learn more about these effective approaches to weight loss, please contact one of our offices in Humble or Houston, Texas, to set up an appointment.
