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Seven Pounds Overweight? It's Enough to Harm Your Health

Posted on Dec 28th 2008 2:00PM by Martha Edwards

Filed Under: Diet & Weight Loss

When it comes to weight, it's typically assumed that five to 10 extra pounds is nothing to fret about. Not so. Being just seven pounds overweight can increase your chances of heart failure.

According to a team of prominent researchers in Boston, "even those who were only modestly overweight had a higher risk of suffering heart failure. Apparently, the more overweight the person is, the higher the risk." Additionally, "regardless of how much exercise a person does, those with a higher body mass index also have a higher risk of heart failure."

Wow -- how disconcerting for those of us who spend hours on the treadmill and can't seem to budge the numbers on the scale. Still, good reasons to watch those numbers, no?

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Tags: lbs, pounds, scale, seven, weight

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

u262f 12-28-2008 @ 7:23PM

The article also says that exercise helps. At the very bottom, it claims, "even if somebody said they exercised one to three times per month - which is a very low level of exercise - they had an 18 per cent reduction in the risk of heart failure after accounting for all other established risk factors."

Doing the math based on the numbers in the linked article, exercising even the tiniest amount (once every 10 to 30 days!) is enough to offset the risk of being over 11 lbs overweight!

So, exercise still helps even if weight doesn't budge! Don't get discouraged! Besides, the linked article's conclusions are very odd. It claims it tracked people across two decades, but it doesn't say anything about people gaining or losing weight or changing their exercise habits in all that time.