When it comes to weight, many doctors and scientists now believe that your waist measurement is the most important factor. Your fitness levels play a part, of course, but the key thing for your wellness and wellbeing is to keep the amount of fat stored around your middle to a minimum.
Knowing your body mass index (usually abbreviated to BMI) is a really good starting point for working out if you are overweight, but it does not represent the whole story by any means. BMI measures how healthy your weight is in relation to your height. You can work out your BMI using any number of available online calculators. If it turns out that you have a high BMI, you are likely to be carrying excess fat. Your health risk, however, could be dependent on whereabouts in your body you store that fat. Storing that fat around your tummy (as opposed to around your bottom or on your thighs) this makes you more likely to develop heart problems or diabetes in later life.
For men, a healthy weight circumference is less than 94cm and for women it is having a waist circumference of less than 80 cm. It can be extremely difficult to lose weight (and to keep it off once you have lost it) but it does have many benefits. It may be that you only need to make some very small changes to your general lifestyle in order to help yourself maintain a healthy weight.
Obesity is a massive health problem, causing over 9,000 premature deaths in England each year, and it also reduces life expectancy by an average of around nine years for every sufferer. Obesity is linked to a number of very serious health conditions including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer.