Doctors consider you to be obese if you are more than 15 percent heavier than your ideal weight for your height and build. Obesity affects about one in five people; many more are simply a little overweight. Most people go on diets purely for cosmetic reasons: they want to look better, feel more attractive, be [...]

Being overweight seems to run in families, probably because everyone is eating the same kind of diet and, genetically, they are not good ‘burners’ of energy. Today, you won’t find the chubbiest baby winning the Beautiful Baby competition because doctors know that it is wrong to encourage fatness in children. An overweight baby often becomes [...]

It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that you are not overweight. ‘Heavy bones’, ‘nice covered’, ‘generous proportions’ are; phrases that we use to disguise the fact of o fatness. But in order to lose weight and, have lost it, maintain your ideal level, you must lea to assess yourself honestly. So how can you [...]

The way you look has a lot to do with your ancestors, your nutrition and your environment. Our genetic inheritance is far from simple, bur like still produces like, and if you come from a long line of small, fairly tubby people, you are probably not going to resemble a tall, slender model. Nutrition also [...]

Just as a car is fuelled with petrol to produce energy, so the human body is fuelled with food, which is composed of carbohydrates, proteins and fats, our three main nutrients. These foods are converted into energy and their energy value in units of heat is calculated in calories (or joules when we go metric). [...]

How do you shape up to life? Are you slim, supple, full of energy and fit for anything? Or are you rather fat and unfit? If you are, you’re by no means alone because about half the population seems to weigh more than is good for them and the figures of people trying to slim [...]