Tuesday 3 November 2015

Weight - Loss, Obesity and Health Risks


Body Mass Index (BMI) is a widely used method for estimating body fatness or weight in terms of height and often is seen applied to most of the men and women falling in the age group above 20 years. For kids with the age of 2 and above, the BMI percentile becomes the base of assessing their fatness over their body. However, the BMI simply do not measure the body fat directly, though several research studies simply indicate that the BMI associate to several direct measures of the body fatness like the underwater weight and issues like dual energy, etc, which become the most cost effective and easy to carry out options. This is not the only method to measure your weight in terms of your height and health, there are ways as well. 

  Img credit: thewellnesschoicecenter.com

Some other ways of estimating your body fat

BMI is not the only method to measure your body fatness; there are several other tools, which can help in calculating your body mass index, some of these are as under: 
  • Bioelectric Impedance Analysis (BIA): It helps in measuring the electrical impedance or the repulsion over the flow of electric current inside your body. Our muscle is known to have a rich water content, which is very much conductive, and on the other side, the fat has less amount of water content, which is certainly not very much conductive. As per the strength of the person’s impedance in terms with height and weight metrics, you can find the BIA scale estimating your fat free body mass (FFBM) and the percentage of body fat.
  • Anthropometric: It employs measuring the circumference of your body in order to find out the fat percentage of your body. Here, you can find people taking the neck, waist and the height circumference for men, while for women the hips, neck and height are considered to measure the fatness in the body. This can be done with a measuring tape.
  • Hydrostatic Weighing: It is often referred as the gold standard of measuring fatness of the body, which demands you to submerge inside the specialised water tanks. As we k now both bone and muscles are denser than water, hence people having larger fat percentage will have more weight in water as compared to the one with lower ones. Using this concept, the body fatness is calculated. 
What are treatment options for morbid obesity?

Though there are other non surgical methods to get rid of morbid obesity but effective are the ones called the surgery. You can find two common types of surgical methods to treat morbid obesity, which include laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery and laparoscopic gastric banding. Let’s take a view on the two as under: 
  • Gastric bypass surgery: It is one of the common methods of shedding extra weight, which works on the idea of limiting the food intake and thus reduces the food absorption. The food intake is simply confined by a small size pouch, which is very much similar in terms of size of the adjustable gastric band.  This surgery is carried out using laparoscope, which include making small size incisions over your abdomen area, which gives the surgeon a better view of your inside making things simple. The surgeon then does the needful and closes the incisions to finish the surgery procedure.
  • Lap gastric banding: This is also one of the popular surgeries carried out for weight loss. It is again carried out using the laparoscopic approach, which involves making small size incisions and inserting the camera and getting the best view of your inside to the surgeon. The surgeon then puts the band across your stomach using special tools, which further restricts the food intake. This in turn helps in working out the effective weight loss. This procedure is often an ideal choice for losing weight even for people who have BMI of 40. In this way, you get rid of the extra weight to avert other health issues to a great extent.

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