If we need to know the answer to how to lose weight fast we are probably also wondering why me? Why is it me that has to know how to lose weight fast and not my friends? We all know examples of people who seem to eat and eat and exercise very little without ever needing to know how to lose weight fast. It’s the same with smoking. We know that smoking can cause lung cancer. Yet not everybody who smokes ends up with lung cancer. We also know that everybody who has lunch cancer has it because they smoke so much. So just like with smoking why do some people put on weight and need to know how to lose weight fast whilst others do not?
We tend to talk about fat accumulation in black and white terms. We seem to fall in to the trap that it is a case of we either have excess fat or we are ‘not fat’ and therefore have none. This is not the correct way of looking at the situation. Talking about it in these terms completely over simplifies an otherwise complicated problem.
We need to start to try to answer this question by also looking at where we get fat? Why is it that men and women differ in where they accumulate fat. It is rare to see a man with a large rear end or big thighs and it is rare to see a woman with a pronounced and extended beer belly. Even amongst women the distribution of fat is quite distinct. Some women will have a voluptuous accumulation of fat on the breasts whilst others will not. Some will see it accumulate in the form of a double chin or as the now famous under arm ‘bingo wings’.
Where we accumulate fat also determines the specific threat to our health. There is no real generic threat to our health from being overweight. The specific threats come as a result of specific accumulations of fat in certain part of the body. Two men, for example may both have the same amount of excess fat that they are carrying around on their body but the man carrying this fat around his waist (or abdomen) is atsubstantially more risk of suffering from heart disease than from a man who may be carrying fat elsewhere on his body such as his legs and arms.
Another examples can be found amongst women in Africa who suffer from steatopygia which is an excessive accumulation of fat in their buttocks. It’s regarded by society there as something which is sexually appealing because it infers that a woman may have in creased chance of being fertile. Whilst these is absolutely no scientific evidence to back up this claim it is none the less worth noting. But some women in these populations suffer from this and some don’t. To say that their fat accumulation is simply a matter of over eating and not getting enough exercise is to do these people a dis-service and would skirt over the real nature of what is going on.
The same question pre-occupied doctors before the outbreak of the second world war. Many studies were conducted into what might cause the specific distribution of fat around the body. Tests were carried out on hundreds of subjects who were put on strict diets. The progress (or otherwise of there weight loss) was closely monitored and photographed and many of the photographs still survive to this day.
One of the most famous studies of this nature was conducted by the German scientist Gustav von Bergman and its conclusions are well worth reading for anybody interested in losing weight.
Tags: how to lose weight fast