Diet And Exercise Not Enough To Fight Obesity

Diet and exercise are not enough to fight obesity, a new study has shown. The study, published in the journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, confirms that more is required to shed that extra weight and keep slim. A person’s body shape is predetermined at birth. Therefore, efforts to lose extra pounds usually result in an 80 to 95 per cent return to being overweight.

Programmes that help obese people usually just put them into a kind of remission that takes effort to maintain. Any real diet or weight loss programme must take into consideration a person’s unique body mechanisms and other uncontrollable genetic and biological factors that make them naturally obese.

While diet and exercise are still the only scientifically proven ways to help obese people, they must be done in conjunction with treatments that look into the underlying cause of obesity, whether they be psychological or biological. The researchers urged people to begin thinking about obesity in the same way as a chronic disease. Obesity is the biggest epidemic plaguing the United States today with more than a third of Americans declared to be obese.

The research, conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, says that although lifestyle modifications may result in lasting weight loss in individuals who are overweight, in those with chronic obesity, body weight seems to become biologically stamped in. Certain genes may make it easier for people to gain weight as they influence where the fat is deposited in the body. Genes have the power to make people gain weight at different rates and places on the body. Few people actually recover from obesity. They may suffer from obesity in remission, and are biologically very different from individuals of the same sex, age and body weight who had never been obese.

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