Why is it considered unhealthy if someone is overweight even if all their blood tests, blood pressure, etc. all come back at healthy levels?

Question

Assumimg that being overweight is due to fat, not muscle.

In: 1317

Answer 1

You’ve had some excellent answers here. I just want to add my bit as a wound nurse. I have had some overweight people heal magnificently well. Some don’t. But what you *are* at high risk for is complications of almost every kind.

Need to have surgery? Your heart and lungs will have to work extra hard to get you through it. Your incision will have a lot of extra stress on it because of the weight. It might just bust open because of it. Worse, you’ll have a lot of adipose tissue beneath the incision. Adipose tissue doesn’t get the same amount of blood supply as do deeper tissues, so it’s more likely to die off. Dead tissue beneath an incision or in a wound makes you more prone to infection. After surgery, you are more likely to develop pneumonia or other respiratory complications because you can’t breathe as healthily as your skinnier comrades.

Your vascular system is probably a complete mess. You’re more likely to have issues with venous stasis, which means blood goes down into your legs and has a hard time getting back to your trunk. So while it’s struggling to return, your legs swell. The extra fluid makes you more likely to develop wounds (plural) that are painful and constantly weep. The only real treatment is compression therapy, which is often uncomfortable, hot, or just a pain in the butt (leg wraps from toes to knees, sometimes changed every single day because they get saturated within hours, and they smell too). But sometimes even compression therapy isn’t enough and you have wounds for the rest of your life. Forever.

You will probably have yeast in your abdominal and breast (yes, men too) folds and groin area. It noticeably smells. If the moisture is really bad, since your skin can’t air out and constantly rubs against the other side of the fold, you can develop wounds here too. Sometimes they also necrose (the tissue dies off) or get infected.

Honestly, I could go on. We should never shame people for being overweight, but the fact of the matter is that your body will absolutely struggle more than it otherwise would, and you are at increased risk for any number of things, some of them life-threatening. If your blood tests and blood pressure are “healthy” now, it’s because your body can still compensate. It won’t do that forever.