Generally speaking, obesity is caused by consuming more calories than your body needs on a day to day basis over a period of time. A lot of fast food and convenience foods these days are very high in fat and sugar content to make them tasty but unfortunately this also means they are high in calories. Together with the fact that most people do not take sufficient exercise this all contributes to obesity occurring.

However the rate in which calories are consumed and subsequently burned off are affected by several other areas including genetic, hormonal, environmental, behavioral and even sometimes cultural factors. When somebody goes to visit a doctor or a weight loss clinic these days, the person’s whole life will go under the microscope to find the exact reason for their obesity.

The interesting thing is that many diseases can actually be completely cured or minimized by losing weight. For example things like blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol and inflammation around the body will all reduce significantly with weight loss. Another advantage of losing weight is that it drastically reduces the amount of pressure on bones and joints as the body does not have to support the extra weight any more, this leads to a dramatic reduction in pain resulting from forms of arthritis.

Just think about it for a moment, one can be forgiven for thinking that obesity in America is at epidemic proportions just by looking around you in a public place and observing the physical appearance of people. All that extra weight equates to a big bag of potatoes weighing ten pounds or more, imagine if you had to carry one of those in both hands around with you everywhere for the rest of your life. No breaks. Well being obese can mean carrying around a lot more than one bag of potatoes. That is probably the smallest amount of weight that most people would want to lose… the average weight loss is about treble that! So imagine carrying three of these bags in each hand, or worse still 6 bags in a back pack, carried around with you for the rest of your life! That puts it into perspective for most people!

The other two areas where you can achieve a positive result just by losing weight is that you can significantly reduce the chances of your getting type two diabetes. If you already have it, it can often dramatically reduce or disappear altogether once the weight has gone.

And last but certainly not least, it protects your heart. Obese and overweight people are at an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease which includes heart attacks, congestive heart failure, sudden cardiac death, angina and abnormal heart rhythm.

One way to find out if you are at serious risk of obesity related diseases is to check the measurement of your waist. If you are female and your waist measures more than 35 inches then you are at risk, the same with men except that the measurement would be more than 40 inches. It is a good idea to have your body mass index (BMI) checked. There are several ways to have this done but probably the first stop would be to seek out someone experienced in measuring peoples body mass index, there are many sources available.

For those of you that are looking for natural alternatives to a prescribed weight loss medication there are many suppliers of products that claim to help people lose weight but most confusing is the enormous amounts of variety available. There is so much out there that the average person can spend years finding a suitable product.