Why Maintaining a Healthy Weight is Important
Morbid obesity is a chronic condition that is very difficult to treat. It can cause a number of serious medical problems, including premature death. Successful weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight can reverse or prevent these problems from getting worse.
In general, a person is considered morbidly obese if he weighs 100 pounds or more over his ideal body weight. A more exact and more widely accepted way to define morbid obesity is to use the body mass index (BMI formula): BMI = weight (kg)/height (m2). A BMI of 40 or more is considered morbidly obese.
People who are morbidly obese have higher rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, premature death and other medical problems. These medical problems can develop with moderate obesity, but how quickly they develop and how serious they are increases dramatically as weight increases. For example, very obese men between the ages of 25 and 35 are 12 times more likely to die prematurely compared to men of the same age who maintain a normal weight.
Medical conditions commonly caused or made worse by obesity:
- Respiratory conditions – Obstructive sleep apnea, obesity hypoventilation syndrome (low blood oxygen), asthma/reactive airway disease.
- Heart conditions – High blood pressure, coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis), heart failure.
- Abdominal conditions – Gallbladder disease, GERD (recurrent heartburn), recurrent hernias, fatty liver.
- Endocrine conditions – Diabetes, hirsutism (excessive body hair), hyperlipidemia, hypercholesterolemia.
- Urinary and reproductive conditions – Frequent urinary tract infections (UTIs), stress urinary incontinence, menstrual irregularity or infertility
- Musculoskeletal conditions – Degeneration of knees and hips, herniated discs, chronic low back pain
- Skin conditions - Multiple disorders, most related to diabetes and yeast infections between skin folds
- Cancer – Breast, uterine, prostate, renal, colon, pancreatic, gastric, gallbladder and endometrium
Bariatric surgery is an option for people who are morbidly obese (BMI of 40 and above) and people with a BMI of 35 to 40 who have life-threatening cardiopulmonary problems or diabetes. Just like other treatments for obesity, the success of bariatric surgery depends mainly on motivation and behavior.
For nearly all people with morbid obesity, bariatric surgery is the standard of care. It offers the best option for long-term weight control when other medically supervised treatments have failed. One of the most popular and successful surgical approaches is the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass.
Gastric bypass surgery is a time-tested operation. It has been endorsed by a 1991 consensus panel of the National Institute of Health (NIH) as the only effective means of inducing significant long-term weight loss for the vast majority of patients with morbid obesity.
