How Obesity Can Affect Your Nutritional Practices

Carrying excess weight does more than make your clothing uncomfortable. Obesity is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain forms of cancer. Although excess body fat may make you look as though you're well fed, obesity and malnutrition can occur at the same time. Losing even 10 percent of your body weight if you're obese pays health dividends, so consider changing your nutritional practices to reach this attainable goal.

Calorie Balance

With the exception of water and a few nonnutritive beverages, everything you consume contains calories. Everything you do throughout the day, including involuntary actions such as smooth muscle movements in your gut and the movement of your diaphragm, costs calories. When you consume more calories than you expend, you gain weight. A larger body costs more calories to maintain, so when you cut calories to lose weight, you may be surprised at how many calories you can eat and still lose weight. As you shed excess pounds, your caloric intake must gradually shrink as well.

Nutrition

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that you keep your caloric intake above a minimum of 1,200 calories per day for women and 1,500 calories per day for men. One of the reasons for these values is that your body burns a certain number of calories in normal metabolic processes during the day; you need some calories to make up for that burn. The other reason is nutrition. It's difficult to fill your nutritional needs for protein, fat and carbohydrates on too few calories.

Malnutrition

Obesity and malnutrition may seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, but the two can occur together. Foods with high caloric values may not offer much in the way of vital micronutrients, leaving you with a belly full of calories and a diet empty of vitamins and minerals. Some of the most nutrient-dense foods are also some of the lowest in calories; fruits, vegetables and lean meats are packed with nutrition for their low calorie costs. Conversely, high-fat and high-sugar foods provide a rich supply of calories. These dense, high-calorie choices leave little room in your diet for more nutritious, but bulky foods like whole grains and leafy greens.

Hormones

Fat is more than an inert padding beneath your skin and around your organs; it's a metabolically active tissue that both produces and is affected by hormones. Excess fat, particularly the visceral fat that contributes to a large belly, produces hormones that contribute to insulin resistance, according to the MayoClinic website's informational page on belly fat. As you gain fat, you tend to have an easier time gaining fat because your body no longer processes insulin as efficiently. Fat cells also produce leptin, a hormone that controls hunger, but this mechanism is still the subject of intense scientific scrutiny.