Summary: find out why it is so important to keep a healthy weight and to avoid various, life-treatening diseases. We write about Body Mass Index and why measuring that alone won’t help to understand your healthy weight.

Healthy weight, ideal weight

Maintaining a healthy weight is important beyond good looks because it helps to lower your risk of various diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer.

What is Body Mass Index (BMI)

In various health clubs when they try to get you to sign up for their yearly plan,  you might get asked if you know your Body Mass Index (BMI). And you wonder what on Earth BMI is… Body Mass Index is a basic calculation that takes your weight and height in to consideration and helps you to understand if you are at a healthy weight. Again, I have to use the word ‘generally’ because although the number you get from this calculation indicates your overall health, however we are not made all the same. For example, BMI doesn’t consider your waist, hip or chest measurements and  you might compare yourself to someone with a very different lifestyle, age or body shape.

Although checking your BMI is not a comprehensive approach, when combined with other tests, it can be a useful indication to your overall body balance. If you are curious to find out yours, there are various BMI calculators on the Internet to help you to measure yours, here is one from NHS: Healthy Weight Calculator. 

Dangers of being overweight

I mentioned above that an overweight person is at higher risk of various diseases, here are a few scary ones for you to understand the importance of being at ideal weight:

1. Diabetes
2. High blood pressure
3. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies
4. Various types of cancer
5. Musculoskeletal problems
6. Psychological problems such as depression and anxiety
7. Neurological problems such as headaches, stroke, and dementia
8. Circulatory issues such as hart attach, heart failure and poor circulation
9. Gastrointestinal illnesses such as liver disease, colon cancer, cirrhosis, or gallstones
10. Infertility at both men and women

It is always a good time to start a new fitness regime to improve your lifestyle and reduce your weight. If you are struggling with the side effects of being overweight such as feeling out of breath, and other breathing problems, feeling heavy, or having high blood pressure, those are all sure signs that you need some change. Change can start small and you can continually build new, healthier life routines.

How to find balance?

Some of us are able to maintain a healthy weight with little effort. Where else others struggle with lots of different kinds of diets. They do strenuous exercise to loose weight and they still don’t achieve the figure they aim for. There are a few, obvious things that you can do for a healthier weight:

• Regular exercise: this doesn’t mean that you have to do strenuous and highly demeaning sport variations 7 times a week. It rather means that it is best to do regular expertise that fits your lifestyle. Consider your body, age, gender, and your interest. The focus isn’t on the exercise type, it is on the word ‘regularly’.
• Don’t sit all day long! These days lots of people sit at computers all day, and they find this an excuse for being overweight. Simple solutions such as taking the stairs in your office building, going for a brisk walk in your lunch time. Or taking public transport or even better, riding a bicycle to work if you can. If you want to watch television, do it while on the treadmill. Walk your dogs instead of paying a dog walker, walk to the supermarket instead of online shopping..etc. There are many small solutions that can improve your weight (and your lifestyle) fairly quickly.
• Eat a balanced diet; reduce sodium, salt, and of course processed food. Eat less meat, more vegetable and more easy-to-digest items.
• If your diet doesn’t contain enough nutrition and you know it (school food, office canteen..etc) cook your own meals and find the right supplements for your diet.

Let us help you!

If you know that you need a change but don’t know where to start it, reach out to us, The Temple team is committed to healthy, daily rituals that improve your lifestyle. We can help you with creating you a perfect exercise regime or a suitable meal plan. Here is an interesting podcast with Pascal on Weight loss & running a Marathon.