FAQ's of Obesity

Obesity is at epedemic proportions in the United States. Over 50% of the adult United States population is overweight and 5% of the population, roughly 15 million people,  is severely overweight.   This population has a condition called clinically severe obesity, defined as a person being greater than 100 pounds over their ideal body weight for their height or a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher. Body Mass Index is a calculation of weight in relation to height..

This condition includes about three times as many women as men. It is much more than a cosmetic predicament. At the minimum it markedly affects quality of life. People with clinically severe obesity are at great medical risk of disability or premature death.

A new study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that obesity may end up killing more people than tobacco use and become the leading cause of preventable death in the USA by as early as next year.

Each year 300,000 Americans die prematurely of obesity-related complications, also known as comorbidities. At the top of the list of these complications is adult-onset diabeties. Many patients with adult-onset diabetes find that their blood-sugar levels improve almost immediately with significant weight loss and become completely normal within a year of surgery. Also, high blood pressure caused by clinically obesity can contribute to heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and stroke.

There are also health issues that affect quality of life. To begin with, people with clinically severe obesity may have sleep apnea or suffer from asthma. They May undergo the misery of low-back pain, urinary stress incontinence, and severe acid reflux. Significant weight loss can often ease these conditions or reverse them completely.

With these individuals, conventional weight loss therapies such as diet, exercise, behavior modifications, and diet pills, have not shown success in long-term weight loss. However, they can be treated safely and effectively by "bariatric" or "gastric-bypass surgery" which induces significant long-term weight loss in clinically obese patients.