WEIGHT MANAGEMENT IN PREVENTION OF CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES.
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What’s the ideal body weight? Some define it to be maximally healthful weight for a person based on mass and height but also influenced by gender, muscular development, and hormonal factors among other factors.
Body weight can be classified into water weight (total body weight due to fluids in our bodies), fat weight (amount of fat in our bodies either deposited in central area eg abdomen and peripheral areas eg arms and hips) and muscular weight (one accumulated during strengthening exercises and muscle building exercises).
Body Mass index (BMI) has been used widely to classify weight and not just body fat. BMI finds the relationship between weight and height (
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)Underweight is basically BMI <18.5
Normal 18.5-24.9
Overweight 25.0-29.9
Obese class 1 30.0-34.9
Obese class 2 35.0-39.9
Obese class 3 >=40.0
There are risks to being underweight like osteoporosis, infertility, immunocompetence among others.
Overweight/obese has been linked to hypertension, diabetes type 2, coronary heart diseases, gallbladder disease, and sleep disorders among others.
You should also monitor the waist circumference both in men and women.
Cardiovascular diseases refers to arrange of conditions from heart attack, heart diseases, stroke, heart failure, arrhythmia among others.
Weight can be managed by focusing on diet intake, exercise and psychological component. Hypocaloric weight management system has one disadvantage however, the loss of muscle weight which may result to wasting and extreme muscle fibre loss. However combination of exercise and diet control has been discovered to be the most effective due to loss of fat weight and maintaining of muscle mass.
Losing body weight reduces heart’s workload. Thus a reduction in blood pressure.
It also reduces blood fats, especially low density lipoproteins, at the same time reducing belly fat.
Weight loss is also linked to preventing stroke by minimizing formation of blood clots.
Exercises have benefits with or without weight loss as discussed in our previous articles.
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