Obesity

What is obesity??? This is a question which has been going on for decades or even centuries about defining obesity and finally they come up a definition that with the body weight with the height matched called the BMI is a particular number, you become overweight and if it’s over 30, you become obese. This does not end there. That is the bottom line. If anyone thinks that their BMI is normal, and so they are not obese, then they are kind of answering just 2 % of the question, the remaining 98 % is still unknown to them.

First, for beginners, obesity is not a condition of being overweight alone.It is a disease, I repeat, it is a dis- ease., something is not at ease ,i.e disease. It is a disease of the body. It's not just because somebody becomes fat, they call obese, they lose their fat and they go down. No, it doesn’t work that way. Obesity is a condition which tells you that the normal balanced state of the interior of your body is not in a correct position, i.e., the normal equilibrium or balance inside your body is currently not proper. It is not balanced, that is what is telling you. So, you better correct yourself and go back to a balanced state.

So what balances are we talking? So many balances we have to talk about. To be simple, to start with something which everybody knows. The first one- the easy one for everyone to understand will be to check the hormonal balance. We know that in the body, there are many hormones coming out of many glands., pituitary gland considered as a master gland has growth hormone and many others, pancreas secrete insulin Glucagon, pituitary secretes thyroxin, adrenal cortex secretes many hormones including cortisol and a lot of them. So, these hormones are coming out of glands, but we forgot about one big endocrine gland,which was not considered as an endocrine gland almost 15 years ago and that is the adipose tissue, adipose means fat tissue. The biggest endocrine gland in the body is the adipose tissue. It secretes more than 100 hormones, lot of them are serving as an interplay between the major hormones and the minor ones. We can even use them as markers or technically tweak a little bit so that the bigger ones get stabilized.

So, to begin with, as we mentioned adipose tissue is fat tissue and the accumulation of the adipose tissue in the body, let me make it clear, the number of adipose cells (fat cells) you have are the same as that they are at the time of birth. The number of cells are the same, but how they become bigger is because when fat is deposited, the cells take in more and more fat and they become enlarged which is called Hypertrophy of he individual cells and that’s how you become fat. So it's not because you gain more cells, but your individual cells become fat. How those cells take in more fat and what is the limit in taking the fat and what is the signal given to them not take in any fatter and more let the fat burn is decided by an interplay of many hormones in the body. The same hormones also affect every other major organ system in the body including the heart, the brain, the kidneys, the liver and the gastrointestinal system , muscular system, everything, and the lungs.These come out of the fat that the adipose cell stages as a center point or serve as a hub in controlling or interchanging these hormones. For eg., a person who is currently having normal blood sugars and the body insulin level is normal ends up eating lot of sugar and sugary items.

So, when more sugar he eats, more insulin is secreted, and insulin favors more fat deposition. It converts the sugars into fat and deposits it. So now these deposition is accomplished by an increase in the insulin level, depending on the type of signals that arise in that particular person, which could be an interplay between his genetic picture and otherwise, the area where the fat is deposited changes and certain fat especially the visceral fat can secrete many smaller hormones or factors which can lead to insulin resistance,and so there the cycle starts  from as  balanced state to a  state of imbalanced, where  the insulin level keeps rising and the cascade of events  start with more inflammation which leads to more other hormones to be secreted to compensate that and it becomes a total chaos.By then the person becomes diabetic, he becomes obese, hashypertension, can develop sleep apnea, can develop kidney failure, fatty liver it from these things stemmed out of a single factor, which is more fat getting deposited. So, the fat, where did it come from, it from what you eat. So, you are what you eat. So instead of shooting the messengers So, the hormones, its better we shoot the primary culprit which is your diet. So, holding your diet steady in certain factors, itis individualized to each person.Just because If one person can eat so much of sugar doesn’t mean another person can eat, because they may react in a different way. We will look into all these details during the obesity consult.