By Dr. Kiran Soni, HOD – Clinical Nutrition and Diabetes, Yatharth Hospital, Model Town, New Delhi
Obesity is now a chronic disease, it is considered as a chronic disease not only the cosmetic thing. And this chronic disease is responsible for most of the lifestyle diseases like heart disease, diabetes, gallstones and many other diseases. Among patients visiting the OPD more than 50% of the patients are affected by obesity and we guide them to take the steps in the form of dietary management and the physical activity. We motivate them to take physical activity for more than 60 minutes daily and take diet which is rich in fibre and avoid fast food, fatty food, fried food and especially the bakery items, the cola drinks, the soda drinks and fruits juices etc.
Along with that we ask them to have lunch and dinner in small portion and dinner should be light and early with the sunset, if you take dinner with the sunset that helps you in controlling the fasting blood sugar and cholesterol. It is not only the, obesity is not only about the appearance, medically it affects all the organ systems of the body, when it gets deposited in the liver it leads to diabetes, mellitus, when it gets deposited in the blood vessels leads to heart problems and when the cholesterol stones are formed and they are accumulated in the gallbladder they are responsible for gallstone, cholecystectomy, gallbladder disease and many other diseases are more than 200 diseases are because of the weight gain only.
It is not only cosmetic, it is a chronic disease that is why we need to treat obesity first to control all lifestyle diseases, with weight loss injections and crash diets, yes, we do lose weight, obese patients do lose weight but that should always be done under medical supervision because if they are not consulting any doctor and they are taking it on your own, then they may face many side effects in the form of nausea, vomiting, pain in abdomen, generalised weakness, muscle loss, problems in the eyes and many more problems along with these weight loss diets, injections, above all that weight loss is not a very big issue, the maintenance of lost weight is much more important, if you keep an eye on your weight and if you have start gaining weight even 1 kg, then you must pay attention to it so that it does not go beyond this, anything and most important we always guide our patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle in the form of that they should get up early, they should eat within sunrise and sunsets, they should follow biological rhythm of the body, they should drink plenty of water in the form like 2.5 to 3 litres of water daily, they should drink, must walk for 60 minutes, have high fibre diet, small and frequent diets, less carbohydrate and more fibre should be there in the diet, less salad is must, sprouts and legumes are good, fruits if not diabetic, 2 times fruits can be taken and dinner should be taken between 6.30 to 7 p.m. with the sunset and should not have anything after that, post dinner walk also plays very important role in regulating the glycaemic levels, so we guide our patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle to prevent development of obesity and lifestyle diseases.