March Forth: Your Amazing Body

Wait… not March Forth… like a marching band. March Fourth… as in the fourth of March!! One of the many things going on in March… besides the beginning of Daylight savings time, March Madness, and of course the holidays, like St. Patty’s Day, the First Day of Spring, and Easter… is World Obesity Day (observed on March the Fourth.)

World Obesity Day was established in 2015 to promote discussion and action around the steadily growing numbers of overweight people around the globe. Numbers from 2023, show that 41.9% of adults in the United States are obese. That means nearly half of adults in the U.S. are at least 20% above normal body weight, with many a lot more than 20% overweight. Those same numbers also suggest that 19.7% (nearly 1 in 5) of adolescents and children in the U.S. are obese. That’s 14.7 million kids!! While weight and overall health are not always connected, obesity is often a risk factor for serious health conditions including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain cancers. More importantly, multiple changes in our culture over the last several generations have promoted (and will likely continue to promote) weight gain in people of all ages for the foreseeable future.

Here’s the AMAZING part of all of this. First, your body is smart and storing fat is your body’s attempt to store up energy for a time that you might need it. When you eat more calories than your body needs at that time, it smartly squirrels away the extra for some later date. You may not like it but that’s a smart, AMAZING body.

Second, your body can adapt. Your body adapts to you gaining weight and your body will adapt and you can lose weight. The heaviest recorded human in history was a man weighing about 1,400 lbs at his heaviest. He had been obese since childhood and regularly weighed between 800 and 900 lbs during his adult life. Sadly, he died at the age of 41 but remarkably his AMAZING body withstood that significant weight for many years. How is that even possible!?!

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