I used to be obese.
Until a couple of years ago, for a few years at least, I had allowed my Body Mass Index (BMI) to rise above 30.
BMI is one of the most widely used method of assessing weight. It involves dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in metres squared (or using a handy online calculator).
If your BMI is between 30 and 40, you would be considered obese. Above 40 and you are considered “morbidly obese”, and a score of 25 and 29 is considered “overweight”.
Your weight is important because being overweight, obese or morbidly obese can have serious health consequences.
Today we have read about new NHS guidelines on losing weight; the approach recommended to GPs has been revised with the suggestion that losing 3% of bodyweight a year and keeping this weight off can have significant beneficial effects.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has also recommended GPs identify people eligible for state-funded slimming classes run by companies such as Weight Watchers, with obese adults given priority.
Apart from the obvious health consequences of being overweight or obese, there are financial costs of obesity.
The direct cost to the NHS of relating overweight and obesity, and related morbidity in England, grew from £479.3 million in 1998 to £4.2 billion in 2007. The indirect costs of obesity are expected to cost the NHS £27bn by 2015.
But what about the financial cost of obesity on a personal level?
Researchers at The George Washington University in the US – where obesity has been a social concern for even longer than in the UK – found that being an obese individual costs $4,879 (£2,902) for women and $2,646 (£1,574) for men each year.
Being overweight costs $524 (£312) a year for women and $432 (£257) a year for men.
Once you add back in the value of lost life to these costs, the financial cost of obesity is even higher: $8,365 (£4,976) a year for women and $6,518 (£3,877) a year for men.
These figures include the direct and indirect costs of being obese or overweight, as well as the cost of lost productivity. They are of course averages, and being obese could have a much higher financial cost for an individual.
Being obese results in you earning less (if you’re a woman, but oddly not if you’re a man), loss of earnings due to short-term disability, higher insurance costs, more sick leave, lower productivity, earlier retirement and higher fuel costs (more time spent driving).
As I’ve learnt from my experience with weight gain and loss, becoming obese is surprisingly easy and getting to a healthy weight is a lot of hard work. It requires education, determination and discipline; all of which makes weight management quite similar to financial planning.
