Obesity –The over-weight and bulkiness of a person’s body due to excessive accumulation of fat in the body is called obesity (motapa). Obesity is a disease which is usually caused due to over-eating of food and lack of physical activity. At present obesity is also caused by taking junk food and snacks such as maggi, burger, pizza and many more. Obesity is also known as the mother of all diseases. It is responsible for increasing blood pressure, sugar content in blood and cholesterol which is harmful for heart.
How Over–Eating Produces Obesity – Our food contains carbohydrates and fats which provides energy to our body for doing work. Some part of the carbohydrates and fats which we take in our diet gets stored in the body as a fat for future use. Now when a person goes on eating more and more food without doing any hard physical work or physical exercise then the unused excess fat goes on accumulating in the body under the skin or around abdomen. The person puts on too much weight and starts looking bulky that is obesity. Thus obesity usually occurs when a person eats more food than his body can consume. This type of obesity can be controlled by controlling the diet and doing a lot of physical exercise.
Obesity can also occur due to imbalance of hormones caused by the malfunctioning of glands or other metabolic disturbances in the body. This type of obesity is a more serious disease and should be treated with appropriate medicines. For example, underactive thyroid gland creates a deficiency of thyroxine hormone in the body. Under these conditions, food is not oxidized completely and goes on collecting as a fat in the body causing over weight or obesity. In this case, the obesity can be corrected by giving thyroxine hormone in the form of tablets.
Thus the two major reasons for obesity are overeating and hormonal imbalance.