Health Risks of Being Overweight & Obesity | How to lose weight fast Health Risks of Being Overweight | Page 16

Weight and lifespan
Being overweight or obese can make just getting around a challenge. Compared with
people at a healthy weight, those carrying extra pounds have a harder time walking a
quarter-mile, lifting 10 pounds, and rising from an armless chair. The burden of these
problems appears to be greater than in years past, probably because people are now
obese for a greater portion of their lives, experts speculate.
And because excess weight plays a role in so many common and deadly diseases,
overweight and obesity can cut years off your life. A New England Journal of
Medicine study that followed more than half a million 50- to 71-year-olds for a decade
found an increase of 20% to 40% in death rates among people who were overweight at
midlife. Among obese people, the death rate was two to three times as high.
A 2010 study in the same journal, which pooled findings from 19 studies that followed
nearly 1.5 million white adults 19 to 84 years old for a similar period of time, found that
the risk of death increased along with body size, ranging from 44% higher for those who
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