by Michelle Wilkinson

Created on: January 20, 2010

A person’s weight can influence how healthy they are, since if you’re carrying a significant amount of excess weight the chances are you’ve got into some bad habits that have made it harder to remain at your ideal weight. Carrying too much weight will be forcing your heart to work harder, as it strains to get the blood pumping around your overweight body, while you will experience the pain in your knees and back from lugging those extra pounds around. It is therefore important to try to control your weight and keep it within a healthy range, particularly as you approach middle age and have to contend with increasing health risks.

Unfortunately, it is often as you reach your forties and fifties that you discover you’re putting on a few pounds as your metabolism begins to slow down and you are forced to deal with changes to your body, especially if you are a woman going through the menopause. The menopause can cause you to gain more weight around your tummy area, something which can also happen to men, although this is likely to be the result of a poor diet and too little exercise rather than the cessation of menstrual periods and hormonal changes!

Weight gain not only has the potential to affect your physical well being; it can also have a negative impact on the way you see yourself.  If you don’t like the person you see in the mirror it can affect your confidence levels, making it difficult for you to want to socialise. It is also when you’re feeling down that you’re more likely to eat too much chocolate and drink too much wine in order to cheer yourself up, even thought this is likely to make you feel worse at the end of the day.

In order to stay a healthy weight you have to keep an eye on your calorie intake and adjust it according to your needs, so that the more active you are the more food you’ll be able to eat. Indeed, exercise is just as important for weight management as controlling your diet; it is perhaps even more essential to exercise regularly than to count calories, as it is exercise which can reduce your visceral fat levels. Visceral fat coats your internal organs and large amounts of it can significantly increase your risk of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Maintaining a healthy weight as you approach middle age is no guarantee of good health, but since you generally have to eat well and exercise regularly to stay a healthy weight, you can find the risk of dying prematurely is reduced, which is why it is worth aiming to stay a healthy weight, particularly at this time in your life.

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