Personality conciousness

I agree in the statement "Beauty lies in the beholder's eyes" but at the same time isn't it better to take care of ourselves? There is an adage in tamil "Aal paathi aadai paathi" which translates to Person counts to half and dress counts to the other half of how a person appears. But most of the time we take so much care about the dress and seldom do we care about our personality which includes the body posture, kind of dressing, presenting yourself in the dress, way we look(thin or fat) and lot more things.
Initially USA had a lot of people with obesity, but slowly people are becoming concious and have changed their lifestyle and food inorder to eradicate obesity. The calorie chart is being printed behind every comercially available food product. This surely helps the people to decide on what to eat and what not to eat. Food is not the only factor that causes obesity, lack of activity also is a prime contributer to this disease. While US is the most obese nation on earth, Australia is not too far behind. But projections predict that in 5 years every third child is expected to be obese. If that comes true then Australia will surpass US.
Well don't be happy that India is not in the top position like how we are leading in population. There is an alarming increase in the condition of obesity in India and other South Asian countries in the past few years. Thanks to all the fast food joints. At survery's done at schools in Indian cities show that 30% of adolescents from India's higher economic groups are overweight. And a Sri Lankan study has shown that 14% of the urban school children are overweight, two thirds of them are from families with high income.
More and more children are being affected by obesity because of the rapid change of lifestyle, more easily available fast food and reduced activity such as excercise or playing outdoor games. Now a days most of the children spend their leisure time surfing net, watching TV, playing indoor games and video games such as Gameboy, playstation etc.
In many asian populations abdominal and central obesity (measured by the ratio of waist to hip circumference) is found to be more common than obesity defined by BMI. Study in India revealed that 20% of adults who are not obese by BMT definition still had abdominal obesity. Professions such as software engineer and call center personnel also contribute significantly to increase in obesity amoung young adults.
Obesity increases the risk of developing Coronary Artery disease, Diabetes, Hyper tension, high blood pressure, Cancers (breast cancers in women and prostrate cancer in men), osteoarthritis, liver disease, reduced fertility and sleep apnoea.
Though obesity is reaching alarming heights in India, obesity has been in the blind spot for long because the government is still fighting under-nutrition. Hence the onus lies on each one of us to take care of us and our children to avoid obesity. In order to avoid obesity eat healthy food with a good mixture of proteins, carbohydrates and fluids and indulge in some physical activity such as sports, exercise, adventure activity etc. We need to be concious about the amount of calories intake that we take during each meal.

(Ref: Hindu Business Line, BMJ Journals)

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