TM-7-1

Body Composition For most Americans, physical fitness training entails sitting around eating Doritos, drinking Coca-Cola, and watching Oprah on the tube. If they're real fitness fanatics, they'll watch reruns of Jane Fonda's aerobics. Not surprising, research conducted by the American Medical Association has revealed that 76% of the adult American population is overweight. Amazingly, 31% of overweight people had enough body fat to qualify for clinical obesity, a classification that required an individual to have at least 20% more body fat than normal.

Do you want to hear something really scary? Of course you do. According to the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA), only 2% of the American male population and 6% of the female population is in excellent shape. Even more amazing, 87% of American males are in poor to pitiful shape. And children are getting heavier too, with a higher incidence of obesity now than ever before. These statistics have created somewhat of a critical alert in the medical community since overweight adolescents are very likely to become overweight adults. Again, it’s mathematics and statistics that indicate that America’s obsession with food has become an epidemic. As you get older, it will be more and more difficult to lose and to maintain body weight as your metabolism slows.

Why is it so important that you do not become overweight? In part because of the health risks associated with being overweight. Obesity clearly poses substantial risk to health. With respect to health risks that the individual can prevent, obesity is considered to be number two after smoking.

Obesity predisposes the individual to medical disorders such as heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure, breathing disorders, and greater risk during surgery. It has been scientifically estimated that if everybody were at their optimal weight, there would be twenty-five percent fewer cases of coronary heart disease in the USA. There are psychological as well as medical hazards associated with obesity. Heavy people are discriminated against with respect to employment, promotion, and social acceptance. Also, obese individuals are more likely to have low self-esteem, and experience more anxiety, depression, loneliness, and unhappiness than people who are not overweight. The public has strong biases against fat people. They are often stereotyped as being gluttonous, lazy and sloppy. Many people believe that overweight people lack willpower and do little besides eat.

Now here is another news flash! There are almost four billion people in the world and one third of them are suffering from malnutrition. Yet, in the United States we have slightly less than 240 million people and close to a third of them are significantly overweight. From a global standpoint, it would seem that at least a quarter of Americans are eating their share of food and someone else's. Now think about this, we live in the most medically advanced country in the world, yet the success rate of most medical weight loss programs is zero, nada.

Of every 100 individuals who go on a weight loss program, only 12 lose weight and only two of those individuals will maintain their weight loss for more than a year. In other words, the success rate of helping someone lose weight is about 2%. That's incredible when you think that the success rate of curing cancer is about 40%. It's even more amazing when you think that the United States spends almost 10 times more money on weight reduction research than it does on cancer research, and that's not counting the billions of dollars that are spent each year on fad diets and gimmicks. If that doesn't freak you out, I don't know what will.

In light of the seriousness of obesity…it’s medical, psychological and social implications…and the acknowledgement that exercise is of significant value in the prevention and treatment of obesity, physical educators now generally list weight control as one of the components of physical fitness.