No matter how good you are at step aerobics and no matter how many tire flips you can do at the gym, if you can pinch more than a lot of inches, the verdict is in … you cannot be fit and fat.
Even if you all the most recent physical exam numbers came back within the healthy parameters, if you’re carrying excess weight, if you're hanging over that belt a little too much, a new study says your odds of developing heart disease are still up to 28 percent greater than a normal-weight guy’s.
Tracking over a half-million people over 12 years, the study shoots down the popular phrase many of us use – I'm “fit but fat.” Overweight men with normal blood pressure, blood glucose, and cholesterol levels have been cheering this for too long. It's now a proven myth.
For all the fun facts of the study, head over to MensJournal.com or The European Heart Journal.
Clearly, a flabby physique is in itself horrible for your heart. “One possible reason is that overweight people with normal blood pressure and triglycerides and no diabetes may not yet have developed the metabolic consequences of obesity,” says study co-author Ioanna Tzoulaki, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London. “In other words, they are not yet metabolically unhealthy, but they are en route to becoming unhealthy.”
Instead of "fat but fit" or "fit but fat," or FBF, others have used the phrase "healthy obesity." All of these should no longer be used. If you’re overweight or obese, the progression from metabolically healthy to unhealthy is all but guaranteed. Let's hit the gym boys! Start walking daily. The guts and muffin tops need to go! Do we need a 6 pack? Hell no, but we do need to lessen our chances of heart disease or failure.
I use to think I was FBF when I was a 36 inch waist, but now that I am up to a 40, I know that the FBF does not exist for me now and really didn't exist back then. You can say I can still run like a track star and lift right along side the fit beasts, but if you have that extra chub, it looks like it will catch up with you sooner than later.
AS FOR THIS BEING A FAT SHAMING ARTICLE …
Fat shaming = the action or practice of humiliating someone judged to be fat or overweight by making mocking or critical comments about their size. There have been some "readers" that say this is a fat shaming article. Please highlight above where we fat shamed and get back to me at adupuis@instinctmagazine.com
If your doctor tells you that you need to lose weight, if he tells you that if your waist is over 40 inches, statistically you are in the highest percentile to have heart and health issues, are you going to look at him and tell him to stop body shaming you?