What do you mean by "health risk"?
Obesity is associated with certain serious diseases. Some
of the more common conditions are high blood pressure, heart
disease, dyslipidemia (abnormal fat levels in your blood),
type II diabetes, and osteoarthritis. There are other, less
common conditions like sleep apnea (which causes difficulty sleeping,
sleepiness during the day, and other symptoms)
that your doctor can tell you about if they apply to
you.
“Health risk” means different things depending on your
current health
status.
• If yoo don’t have any of these diseases or conditions
right now,
your health risk is a measure of how likely you are to
develop one or more of them.
• If you already have one or more of the
obesity-related diseases,
your health risk tells you how likely it is for these
diseases to get worse, or to develop another obesity-related
disease. For example, someone who is obese and has high
blood pressure is more likely to develop other diseases,
too, like heart disease.
• Therefore, this person would have a higher health risk than
someone of the same BMI but who is free of any disease.
For everyone, the higher the health risk, the greater the
chance of early death due to the obesity and these
obesity-related diseases. And although these diseases
usually get worse as a person becomes more obese, they
usually get better and can even
go away when you lose weight and keep the weight
off.
