breaking the obesity cycle
Jenny Bryan and Rachel Newcombe
In 1980, less than 10% people in Britain were obese. Since then, the figure has trebled. Estimates suggest that over half of all adults in the UK – a massive 24 million – are overweight or obese. There are also about 700,000 obese children in the UK.
© Getty
Weight problems start young. In a study of Leeds schoolchildren, 20% of nine year olds and a third of 11 year old girls were overweight. One in ten of the primary schoolchildren in the study were obese. Easy access to food and lack of exercise at home, at school and at work are widely held to blame for the nation's growing weight problem.
It's been called a national epidemic, though Dr Andrew Hill, former chairman of the Association for the Study of Obesity and a Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Leeds, dislikes the word.
'It makes it sound like it's catching – that you can go to someone's house and waking up the next morning and find you've put on 10 stone. Obesity isn't like that. It's something that creeps up on you. It happens to people who put on half a stone a year for 10 years,' he explains.
obesity – a health risk
Someone is said to be obese if their body mass index (BMI) is over 30. Being obese doesn't just make it harder for them to find clothes that fit, it means they are more likely to have a heart attack, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis and some forms of cancer.
Obesity takes an average nine years off an individual's life expectancy, and it is this increased health risk rather than the excess weight itself which specialists such as Dr Hill believe should be the focus of obesity management. The days of encouraging people who are very overweight to lose five or six stone are coming to an end. Instead, the way out of the obesity 'epidemic' lies with more realistic and achievable goals.
(July 2001, resources updated March 2005)
