Overweight & Healthy

For Your Good Health…

Tips for healthy living.

Due to the dramatic rise in U.S. obesity rates since 1980, all people (except those with certain pre-existing medical conditions) should increase or maintain daily physical activity and eat healthfully to achieve and maintain healthy weight.

Individuals with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25 and 26 may be at risk for overweight. (See below for how to calculate your BMI.) Increased vigilance to healthy diet and exercise is critical to maintaining a healthy weight.

At lower levels of overweight and obesity (with a BMI 27-30 and maybe above), regular exercise and improved fitness may offset or decrease the strain on metabolism associated with being sedentary and overweight. (As BMI increases significantly above 30, however, the increase strain on metabolism may override the apparent protective effects of exercise against premature death and disease.)

Research shows that being active on a regular basis may be more important than being thin. Increased health risk varies associated with BMI varies across age groups as well. More research is needed to better determine how physical activity, fitness and BMI together affect health throughout life. For now, however, we know that these factors are each individual pieces of data that interact to affect present and future health. Consider the many factors that together affect health and take steps to improve your own health as necessary. Moderate weight loss could be critical to improving your health.

Regardless of your BMI, build upon what you are doing right. Fitness evolves. You can refine your lifestyle habits and enjoy increasing levels of pleasure, health fitness and well-being. Nothing happens overnight-not overweight, not fitness. They are both years in the making.

The new guidelines, released bt the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, evaluate body mass index, or BMI, a relative measure of body height to weight, to determine who is overweight. A BMI of 25 is now considered overweight: a BMI of 30 is classified as obese.

For example a 5-foot-5-inch woman who weighs 150 pounds has a BMI of 25; her BMI is 30 if she weighs 180.

To calculate your BMI; Multiply your weight in pounds 703, divide by your height in inches squared.

If a higher level of wellness is a personal goal of yours, but you are in need of some external guidance and motivation, contact your neighborhood Pharmacist / Nutritionist / Fitness Professionals at Carnegie-Sargent’s Pharmacy and Health Center.   (312) 280-1220.  Remember health promotion begins with you!