Losing weight isn’t just about looking good; it’s about saving your life too!  

Unless you take extra efforts to lose your excess weight, you may end up destroying your life. Sounds harsh, I know. But it is reality.

Here are three reasons why being overweight can destroy your life:

1. Increased weight means increased health problems

A 10-year long Harvard study among 170’000 people came to this conclusion: an overweight person faces a higher-than-average risk of developing a whopping 50 different health problems.

The variety of health problems include certain cancers, diabetes, heart related issues and even depression.

A 2007 study in Archives of Internal Medicine examined the connection between weight and heart disease in a meta-analysis involving more than 300,000 people. The study concluded this:

• Being overweight increased the risk of heart disease by more than 30%
• Obesity increased the risk by more than 80%

2. Being overweight affects your brain

Overweight and obesity harm most of our organs in the body and the brain is no exception.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found out that overweight people have 4% less brain tissue than people of normal weight and obese people have a staggering 8% less brain tissue. The lesser the brain tissue also means that people suffering from obesity have problems with memory, thinking and even reasoning.

In addition to this, Dr. John Gunstad, a psychologist at Kent State University in Ohio, who studies how diseases affect thinking abilities, researched the relationship between obesity and scoring on cognitive tests.

He and his team found that, in general, the participants who were obese scores lower than healthy participants. On some tests, including memory tests, nearly 1 in 4 participants suffering from obesity scored low enough to be considered as having a learning disability.

But there is hope too, for getting rid of excess fat actually improves brain function, reversing the ill effects of the extra weight.

3. Obesity is one the major causes for early deaths

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the effects of obesity lead to more deaths than the effects of malnutrition and being underweight.

In the U.S. alone obesity accounted for 18 per cent of deaths between the ages of 40 and 85. Obesity is also responsible for more than 30,000 deaths each year in the UK.

Alarmingly, it has recently been suggested that obesity could overtake tobacco smoking as the biggest cause of preventable death.

Solution

Prophet (SAW) said, “Your body has a right over you” (Sahih Bukhari). Being overweight means, you are certainly abusing your body and not giving the right your body has over you.

What is the simple action you can take now to reverse this abuse?