You all must have noticed in your friend or relative circle that even while having the same lifestyle some people are slim, some are fat and others are just obese. Why? It is written or coded is the right word for how and where the fat in our body shall be stored. If you have parents or grandparents whose fat deposition happened around neck then there is a possibility you have it too. If your family has athletic body like mine (bragging), you will have that luxury too without having to exercise you can maintain a slim body. But genetics just decide our default state of body that we are heading towards if we do nothing about it, which is a happy news, how? Well, if it is default that means it can be modified. How can we do that? By making some changes in our life. For that to happen we have to first understand how obesity happens. The causes. Let’s go.

The main cause of obesity is eating a lot without doing any physical activity which results in all those calories being converted to fat and being deposited in your body. It’s not like you eat food and shit food. The food gets digested by your body to produce energy sources like calories, ATP etc. which helps to move and do physical activities. If you just eat, sit, sleep, laze around it will get saved for future use. Adding cherry to the top, eating fast foods or junk foods (they should be called trash foods) blesses you with ton of saturated fats and trans fats which are useless and dangerous for your body, and add that with zero physical activity, you get obesity.

Nowadays obesity not only haunts adults, it is also affecting children as it is slowly getting coded to the gene. Fat parents ultimately lead to fat children, which is contributed 50% to their gene pool and other 50% to their lifestyles. All this stem from the comfortable lifestyle that they are leading. This is not their fault alone as this world is solely and competitively getting dependent on intelligence, physical fitness is no longer a factor in the survival of species. Well, that’s what they think anyway and that thought process has led to the current system where children are studying 12-14 hours a day, rest of the time either studying or playing games that being not physical but virtual, eating junk foods, not having any discipline and all these factors affect ultimately their health by making them fat and obese. These arise some questions like, how much fat should a person have in their body? Is our body supposed to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger? To be perfectly frank with you what people are showing you on YouTube or Instagram about having a six-pack low fat body is very unhealthy just like being obese. Having too much or too little can be and is really bad for health. People who have visible six pack abs have body fat less than 13% and body builders have 7-8% body fat. When you go below 11% body fat, your body constantly feels cold because the fat acts as a thermal regulator and having less is like being covered by a thin blanket in winter. Body builders may look strong with those big guns blazing but honestly if you just research a bit, you will know they are weak, starving and constantly sleepy all the time. If you truly want to know what the world’s strongest men look like search for them on google and you will find people named Halfthor Bjornson or Felix, who are thick having more muscle mass and complimentary fat that looks nothing like those Mr. Olympia body builders. For a normal male healthy fat percentage is 14-16% and for female a bit higher 16-18% and for pregnant women it is somewhere close to 20%. How can you achieve this?

Start doing the following things one by one. I am not telling you to do all of them in a single day but try doing little by little overtime. Good things take time.

- Cut down on eating junk foods.

- Start exercising.

- Eat healthy foods a lot that includes vegetables, meat, fruits. Don’t cut on these, ever. Eat until you are 70% full and eat 1-3 hours after starting to feel hungry. Within that 1-3 hours try small exercises which will enable your body to burn the stored fats that it derives from daily intake.

- Start intermittent fasting twice a week. No, you won’t die from fasting. A human body can go on for 30-45 days without eating and that ability has resulted from uncertainty in getting food during ancient times where our fore-fathers and ancestors did not get 3 meals per weeks let alone per day like we do. This is a gift for us,so be thankful to them.

- If you are married, do more bed exercises. You know what I’m talking about. Yeah, that.

- Avoid high sugar and salt content foods. You don’t have to cut on all of it, just eat occasionally like once per week and little bit too, not a week’s worth.

Health is Wealth. If you are making a shit ton of money but leading an unhealthy lifestyle then that money may or may not save your sorry ass in the future. Compared to that if a person is earning less than you and leading a healthy lifestyle, he is wealthier than you, may be not richer but definitely wealthier. So, lead a healthy life. You will look good, feel good, have good time and definitely good performance no matter what you do. Best of luck on your journey to be healthy.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash