By Flynn Demapendan
Many people worldwide are told to ‘lose weight’ as it is an ‘easy thing to do,’ but this is not the case. Approximately four million people worldwide die annually due to obesity, and weight loss is mostly recommended as a priority for therapy in overweight and obese patients. Due to the annual million deaths of obesity the World Health Organization describes being overweight and obesity as an ‘abnormal condition’.
As many individuals put themselves through the process of weight loss, not everyone gets the results they want. Few studies from the National Library of Medicine show that, through the process, weight loss either slows down, stagnates, and even reverses in 85% of cases.
Among the majority of people suffering to lose weight, their reasons range through a variety of things, ranging from what sex a person was born as to medical reasons.
“Several conditions can cause weight gain or hinder weight loss,” says Rebecca Kurth, MD, director of PrimeCare at Columbia-Presbyterian Eastside and associate professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University. Kurth then went on to list the main and common conditions that affect the process of weight loss:
Chronic Stress:
- Having to live with a mixture of stress, anxiety and grief, the body can produce chemical substances, specifically the hormone cortisol, which heightens the chances of the body to store more fat specifically around the waist.
Cushing’s Syndrome:
- This condition happens when the top of each kidney, adrenal glands, produce too much cortisol which leads to an extra build up of fat in the face, upper back and abdomen.
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS):
- This is a result of a hormonal imbalance in the female body which affects more than 8-13% of women, 70% of them going undiagnosed. A symptom that affects weight loss is weight gain that is not caused by excessive eating by the person but by the imbalance of hormones.
Syndrome X:
- Having this condition makes the body resistant to insulin, and when a body is affected like this, other hormones that help control the metabolism will not work either
Medical conditions are also not the only reason why losing weight could be difficult, but also what sex you were born as at birth. According to ‘Medicine Net,’ there are many comparisons between the male and female sex when it comes to storing fat, fat distribution and muscle mass.
According to TXH, Texas Health Resources and Medicine Net, comparing both men and women with fat storage, women are hormonally made to store more fat in their body.
The hormone estrogen, typically found in women-aligned bodies, produces the fat and takes care of the fat storage in the body. Women are also most likely to carry around 6 to 11 percent more body fat than men, and given the lower muscle mass and more fat, it is more difficult for women-aligned bodies to lose fat.
The manager of the Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth Fitness Center, Randy Turner, has stated from his own experiments and research, he found that men lose weight at a faster rate than women. In conclusion he found it was due to a key physical difference between both sexes which is the basic metabolic rate, BMR. The difference between BMR’s is that the male body is built to burn more fat quicker than women’s. “In most cases, men have more lean muscle than women, so it’s easier for them to lose weight more quickly,” Turner said.
Overall, the concept of losing weight could be seen as either easy or difficult by people alike, as they all deal or experience with their own advantages and disadvantages.
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