More news for the socialists to rejoice in: fat people die younger. Great fodder for the crowd that believes they need to legislate what other folks do with their bodies.
If you’re a fat smoker, you stand to lose 13 years on the average:
Dutch researchers studying Americans found that there’s a lot to lose for those who don’t lose their extra pounds. Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the data from the Dutch study were gathered from more than 3,450 subjects between the ages of 30 and 59. The researchers categorized people according to their body mass index, or BMI. A BMI of 19 to 24 is typically considered healthy, while a BMI of 25 to 29 is considered overweight, and a BMI of 30 or more is clinically obese.
Among those subjects who were overweight but not actually obese, the study showed that 40-year-old female nonsmokers lost 3.3 years of life due to their excess weight. In this weight class, the 40- year-old male nonsmokers lost 3.1 years of life expectancy. For non- smokers who were clinically obese, the news only got worse for women, who lost about seven years of life because of their obesity, while the men of this size lost just less than six years.
Not surprisingly, the loss is much greater for overweight smokers. When we add the strain and damage of cigarettes to the body’s burden of obesity, the loss doubles, to around 13 years for both men and women.
I think your body belongs to you, but I’d encourage you to take good care of it. We all go through a phase where we think we’re invincible. That tends to fade as age catches up to us. Stretch the quality of your life out as long as possible. There’s no sense suffering any more than you have to in life, and many of us spend the last decade or two pretty decrepit. It’s senseless.