Obesity can be such a complex metabolic disease it is not enough that a person diets and exercises, more doctors are saying.
You've probably heard it far too many times that if you want to lose weight and no longer be obese, you need to diet and exercise. This basically explains why there are dozens of diet and exercise programs you can choose from.
However, there is a growing number of health experts who suggest that recommending these is really not enough for people who are clinically or chronically obese.
Doctors from various universities in the United States have come together to write a paper for the Lancet and say obesity's effects go beyond putting on fat. It basically changes the way your inner body works. For this reason, it is considered as a metabolic disease.
And because the disorder is more complicated that you'd like to think, even if an obese person loses weight, he will have a hard time maintaining it. In fact, as many as 95% of those who lost weight will gain everything back-and more-in a matter of a few months. Even weight loss surgeries are not truly effective in the long term.
Why does this happen anyway? It's because the body becomes used to a certain weight. When a person diets, for example, and restricts calorie consumption, the body perceives this as scarcity. It thus triggers many biochemical systems that strive to let you go back to your previous weight.
Rather, an obese person who loses weight is called "in remission," which means the chances of becoming obese again is real and high.
The doctors then believe that the way to reverse obesity is to adopt many proven measures alongside diet and exercise.
Previous studies not related to the paper also suggest that some people are predisposed to obesity. They have identified more than 90 genome areas that regulate a person's weight and therefore obesity.
