Global obesity--at least one-sixth of the global population are too heavy from eating greasy, high-fat, low-nutrient, chemical-laced, mass-produced foods. The global growth of industry and technology has led to an abundance of cheap, high-calorie meals, unhealthy sugary snacks, and steep decrease in physical activity, resulting in obesity on a global scale. If corrective measures are not taken soon, globesity could become as devastating as malnutrition—making it more harmful to the world than starvation.
And America is leading the pack in this. We eat unhealthy convenience foods and have sedentary lifestyles. Even our leisure time is filled with watching television or surfing the Internet. Two-thirds of American adults aged twenty years and older are overweight and the number of those who are extremely obese—at least 100 pounds overweight—has quadrupled since the 1980s. In fact, if Americans keep gaining weight at the current rate, U.S. researchers at Johns Hopkins University predict that 75 percent of U.S. adults will be overweight (and 41 percent obese) by 2015.
To add to the problem, popular diets and weight loss programs just don’t cut it. For instance, starvation diets and continuous calorie-restrictive diets will almost always backfire because the body thinks it is starving to death and slows down its metabolic rate, becoming even more efficient at storing fat. When you resume “non-starvation” eating again, you gain the weight back even faster, even though you may be eating less than you were before you embarked on the diet.
Low fat or fat-free hasn’t panned out, either. The low-fat craze of the 1990s did not make us any thinner. Why? Those low-fat and fat-free foods had nearly the same amount of calories as the “full fat.” People would eat more reduced fat items because they thought they could—not knowing that food makers often replace the fat in snack foods with extra sugar, flour, and other waist-expanding ingredients.
And some have desperately fallen for the “fashion model” look by bingeing, purging, using laxatives, drinking diet soda, and overexercising. These trigger a cascade of molecules in their blood to help them rebound from their severe diets, which causes them to overeat all over again—and then start the binge-purge-diet cycle all over again.
So…why Perfect Weight America? The goal of Perfect Weight America is not to look like anybody but yourself—at a “perfect” weight that makes you look and feel good about yourself and that will promote good health for the rest of your life.
