WHAT CAUSES OVERWEIGHT

This is the question most people that gain weight usually ask themselves. You look back at a point in your life when you were just at weight you usually loved and start wondering what happened along the way. What causes most people to gain weight is not that it’s intentional but the life style they live. In most cases if you change from one life to another and you get carried up and you want to have the fun all the time, you end up being caught in the weight gaining group. Along the way, you may have encountered the following circumstances that made you gain weight;

Alcoholism

Alcohol has a different way of being metabolised. Alcohol has been known to change the course of digestion. Assuming you eat other foods alongside alcohol, it said that alcohol will get the immediate action because it’s considered a toxin to the body.

In the liver, alcohol is given the first priority. This means the liver focuses on the processing of the alcohol ignoring other processes until it finishes processing it.

Thus if all the liver functions is focused on processing the alcohol, if you had a meal contain carbohydrates and fat, the calories from these foods are converted in to body fat and carried away for permanent storage in the body.

Genetic factors

Genetics is a very easy topic to understand but up to now discoveries are being made. Actually at one time I also wanted to specialise in genetics. But our big question is how does genetics influence weight gain. Genes may affect you appetite, food cravings, body fat distributions, the tendency of eating and coping up with stress. Studies carried out show people with two copies of a specific gene, Insig-2 are most likely to have a BMI higher than 30. However the influence of these genes vary from person to person.

Eating disorders

These are psychological illness defined by abnormal eating habits that may involve either insufficient or excessive food intake. They are various eating disorders but the one that is most common among overweight people is the Binge eating Disorder (BED). This is eating disorder is characterised by binge eating without compensatory behaviour along with feelings of shame and guilt after overeating. This disorder can develop among people of various ages and different social economic classes.

Insufficient or poor quality sleep

Studies show that insufficient promotes hunger and appetite which can cause excessive food intake which eventually leads to weight gain. Lack of sleep also creates a feeling of tiredness which make the person reluctant to do physical exercises. Furthermore, it make people make poor food choices and people are more inclined to eat more food than they actually need. Insufficient sleep also reduces the ability of the fat cells to respond to the insulin. Insulin is a hormone that is important for the breakdown of fat.

Hormonal imbalance

Studies show that women may gain weight at the time of their lives when there is a shift in their hormones. This maybe at puberty, during pregnancy and at menopause.  If a person suffers from hypothyroidism where the body can’t produce enough thyroid hormone to burn the stored fat, the body metabolism will be slower which will lead to weight gain.

Metabolic disorders

These occur when abnormal chemical reactions in the human body disrupt the metabolism. When this occurs, some substances will accumulate more than others. The situation worsens when these disorders develop in some organs like the liver and pancreas. When this occurs the person is at a high risk of obesity, because the liver is responsible for metabolism and the pancreas is responsible for release of insulin that burns down fat.