If you have decided to read this then you are probably somebody who is overweight or you have an interest in losing some body fat – these days that’s more or less everybody! There are now more obese people than undernourished people on the planet so there is a likelihood that you are in the camp of wanting to lose your excess.

So why should you count yourself lucky to be lumping your extra poundage around? You should be thankful because you have the chance to stop yourself becoming sick and perhaps dying an early death from a chronic disease.

If you have decided to try and lose weight because you have a ‘visible’ problem then you are lucky because the immediate solution of losing fat brings a whole load of other benefits besides you looking better which is a superficial reason anyway.

High insulin, high blood pressure, diabetes, high triglycerides and other metabolic issues may all have gone unnoticed because you cannot SEE them but ask yourself…do you really think that if you are fat on the outside that everything is lovely looking on the in? No chance! Unlike being overweight, the conditions listed above don’t have any real noticeable symptoms even though some may put you at serious risk of heart disease and death. You can walk around with serious heart disease without a clue. You can’t, of course, be unaware of your own fat.

It’s easy to ignore some very important indicators of health because you can’t see them especially when they are not staring in your face like the mirror does. It is perhaps a little like the story of Dorian Gray. In the story, Dorian Gray has a portrait painted of himself but every time he commits a sin (e.g. gluttonous, excessive eating and drinking) the portrait decays and not him. By the end of the story there is one seriously rotten-looking painting hidden in the attic! Make no mistake that if you eat and drink crap it is going to do damage to your health and just because everybody else does it and you’ve got to have a treat then you are still going to pay the price.

So, being is overweight is lucky because if you address the weight issue you have a very good chance of stopping some conditions or even putting them into reverse.

The question next is how do you address that weight issue?