“Many times we go to the pharmacy more to spend on medications with their respective side effects when we can normally collaborate with the prevention of diseases through physical exercise. It’s cheaper and on top of that it doesn’t have secondary effects”, says Hugo Flores, a graduate in Physical Education.
The professional, recognized physical trainer and professor of the Physical Education career, chatted with Radio Ancasti on this the problem of obesity“which is multidisciplinary” for its treatment and requires very important support for the first step, which is physical exercise.
“To date, there is no medication with such a potentially beneficial effect and at such a low cost for the prevention and treatment of so many pathologies that exist, such as physical exercise. Well-dosed exercise, prescribed by health professionals Health (Physical Education teachers) depending on the pathology, it will have one effect or another on people’s metabolism”.
Flores indicated that “it is essential that, in this case, the professional in charge knows not only about training, or how to prescribe exercise, but fundamentally about the physiology and biochemistry of exercise. For example, obesity or diabetes are ‘pandemics’, more people died from the effects of obesity than from the Covid 19, which is declared a pandemic; there are more people who died, that is, not directly, because nowhere do they tell you that ‘people died of obesity’, but of diseases generated by it in the body: a stroke, a heart attack. Obesity is, in general, a disorder also generated by the lack of physical exercise”, he specified.
Aware of the matter, he said that the process is not easy, but that the satisfaction of progress is a motivation that invites people with these disorders to try.
“Usually we get it often, they ask us often, Obesity not only brings mobility problems, but also psychological problems that it brings. People seeing themselves in this situation sometimes do not want to go out on the street, they have low self-esteem, it is a rather multidisciplinary problem. It not only affects physical exercise but in several disciplines between which we would have to agree to improve the quality of life of that person”, he said.
“The first step is to ask him if he is willing to carry out the physical activity to improve especially your metabolism. It has to do directly with health. Many times we have confused the concept of losing weight and losing fat mass. Obesity by definition, according to the World Health Organization, is an excess of fat mass, not excess weight. It’s not height and weight, it’s fat mass index and muscle mass. We try to monitor what is the percentage of muscle mass, how much of fat mass and try to reverse that situation. When the muscle is filled with fat, it is called lipotoxicity, and it causes a metabolic problem in the person that prevents them from using fat as fuel. So the first thing to do is increase muscle mass so that the muscle acts better metabolically in the body”, defined the PF.
“It is a long, hard process for the people who are going to carry it out, but it is a satisfaction to achieve the objectives step by step. Overweight and obesity bring with it diabetes, they bring with it hypertension, a host of cardiovascular problems. It begins with being overweight: an excess weight of 4 or 5 kilos is conducive to developing an increase in blood pressure, an increase in blood sugar, so all these things mean that it is not a single disease, it is several diseases that converge there,” he explained.