Obesity is no joke. Sure, we’d all like to drop a few pounds and look and feel our best. But when you’re suffering from obesity, as more than 40% of Americans are, everything gets much more serious.
Obesity can lead to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, musculoskeletal issues like osteoarthritis and cancer. It can significantly impair your movement, make everyday tasks seem impossible, and quickly isolate you. Obesity can cause death and disability.
What many people don’t realize is that obesity is a chronic relapsing disease, the impacts of which start when someone is only slightly overweight, quickly snowball, and can be hard to revert.
That’s why it’s vital to act no matter how overweight you might be. It’s important to understand there are no quick fixes, and no miracle cures. Losing weight is a serious undertaking that will mean carefully considering nutrition and activity, as well as the latest medical innovations that are available to you.
While an obesity epidemic is raging in the U.S., this is not an unstoppable issue on either a personal or a societal level.
Whether you’ve just noticed that your winter belly isn’t shifting the way it once did, or you’ve realized you need to make a major life change, a combination of weight loss solutions will transform your life and keep the weight off.
What does obesity do to your body?
The effects of obesity on your body are extensive and serious and can lead to the onset of other diseases.
These are known as comorbidities – the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or conditions.
Type 2 diabetes is a well-known comorbidity caused by the buildup of fat cells around the body leading to insulin resistance. This is especially true for people suffering from or at risk of developing obesity.
Cardiovascular disease is another, caused by fatty deposits around the heart muscle that prevent it from functioning properly.
But these are just a few. Obesity can lead to problems with almost all your bodily functions. It can cause strokes, hypertension, asthma, chronic back pain, pulmonary embolism, gallbladder disease and several types of cancer.
Obesity adds an extra burden to your skeleton and muscles, making it hard to get around and leading to disability.
And as obesity isolates you, with comorbidities making it harder and harder to lead a normal life, it can lead to mental health issues as well. Recent studies have shown that obesity is in fact a risk factor when it comes to developing depression.
The importance of exercise
No matter what scientific wizardry might emerge in the near or distant future, or the so-called wonder drugs available now, exercise is always going to be a vital component of any strategy to manage weight or treat obesity.
Getting active and maintaining active habits and hobbies will change your metabolic rate over time. That means your body will get used to turning more food into energy and less into fat stored for later.
Exercise increases energy expenditure, making sure your body uses up the calories it’s taken in from meals, and if you do enough it will start to burn through the energy reserves it’s stored around your body, i.e. your fat.
Physical activity specifically can help reduce fat around the waist, which has been shown to have a particularly clear connection to increasing insulin resistance and leading to type 2 diabetes.
Meanwhile, strengthening activities like weightlifting or calisthenic exercises like pushups will help make your muscular frame more robust and push back against the debilitating burden of obesity even before you’ve shed the pounds.
How can weight loss medication help?
For almost everyone, getting started with exercise is challenging. When you’re trying to combat obesity, this can be even harder.
The extra weight you’re carrying not only makes it more daunting to get moving, it also means there are additional health considerations to account for.
For example, the wrong sort of exercise when you’re overweight could lead to damage to your joints like your ankles or put your heart under strain it’s not ready to bear yet.
At the same time, your biology might resist your weight loss efforts initially.
Our bodies have evolved to work hard to ensure we will always have enough energy reserves.
When you start to burn weight, your body realizes your energy expenditure has gone up and starts to stash more calories away as fat, so we have enough for later. Your metabolism slows down, so you don’t burn too many calories too quickly.
You also start to feel less full. The hormone that tells our brain we’ve had plenty to eat, leptin, is released by fat cells. As you get rid of fat, less leptin is released, so you start to feel hungrier.
GLP-1 medications like liraglutide and semaglutide can help with these additional challenges. These drugs slow down your digestive system so you feel fuller for longer. This helps to counteract the reduction in leptin caused by burning fat, so your hard work in the gym isn’t immediately undone by a bigger appetite.
These drugs also work directly to combat some of the most dangerous comorbidities associated with obesity. They were first developed as anti-diabetic drugs and specifically work by increasing sensitivity to insulin. This pushes back the insulin resistance that belly fat causes and which leads to type 2 diabetes.
Why combination is king
Given the remarkable success of GLP-1 medications, you might be wondering why bother with the exercise at all.
But remember – there is no miracle cure! Weight loss medication like liraglutide and semaglutide is so successful because they help remove obstacles on your weight loss journey, ensuring that positive changes to diet and exercise can properly take effect.
Developing a proper exercise routine, one that you will be able to maintain for the long term is essential for improving your body’s metabolic rate so you keep burning calories instead of turning them into fat.
GLP-1s also only work as long as you’re taking them. As soon as you stop you are likely to put the weight back on. These medications are not a quick fix, and you need to plan for the next stage of your weight loss journey – your ongoing weight management strategy.
Once you’ve managed to bring your body weight down to a healthy level, nutrition and activity are what will keep you there. Weight loss medication can help you make those vital first steps, but as you do so you need to be strengthening your body and establishing healthy habits.
Science is a wonderful thing. These new medications completely change the prospects for many people who have been struggling to lose weight and address issues with obesity.
But they are an addition to our arsenal of weight loss weaponry, not a replacement. Think carefully about how they can complement other weight loss strategies and you will have the best chance not just of dropping weight but keeping it off.
