(BlackDoctor.org) -- A reader to one of my previous weight loss articles made a very intriguing point: That entertainer Mo’nique preaches “big is beautiful” and gets away with it.  Mo’nique isn’t the only entertainer who gets away with this. In fact, there is actually a movement out there called “health(y) at every size.”
    
Claiming that you can be big AND healthy is the same as claiming you can be a smoker and healthy. A person should not sit back and “accept” his or her overweight body, any more than a smoker should accept his nicotine habit and cease efforts to quit smoking. Saying, “I am comfortable with my body” does not improve health status, and it is not the same as saying, “I am self-confident.”
    
Feeling “comfortable” will not alter a medically established fact: Excess body fat is a health hazard! No matter how “beautiful” you think your “curves” are, you are still at exaggerated risk for many diseases, including type 2 diabetes, breast and colon cancer, heart disease, worn-down joints, back pain, gout and, as time marches on, inevitable problems with mobility. Heart disease doesn’t care if you have “come to terms” with your body and have “learned to love my body”!
    
Yes, you should not let extra size impede your ability to feel ready to take on the world and hold your head high. But it’s a whole new ball game when you start believing that obesity and good health belong in the same sentence. How many people, who are 75 pounds overweight, can sprint? I don’t mean at Olympic speed, but rather, what I call a mad dash across a parking lot in the pouring rain? The human body was designed for fast running. Significantly overweight people cannot do this. In fact, many moderately overweight people are unable to run hard. And I’m talking only short distances, too.
    
When something prevents the body from swiftly running, this can’t be healthy. A body that cannot run fast is a handicapped body. There are also non-overweight people who cannot sprint. But this is a poor argument, because if you take 100 slim adults under age 40, and 100 same-age adults who are 50-100 pounds overweight, and have them run their fastest for just 25 yards, you won’t see very many, if any at all, of the big group actually sprinting, but many in the slim group will. Running fast is one of the body’s must fundamental abilities; it’s not an athletic gift – it’s what nature has programmed us to do. But modern-day living has de-programmed us.
    
Many very big people claim they “feel” healthy. But under what circumstances? Look at how easy it is to live in these modern, highly technological times, in which everything is done for us at the click of a button! Think about it: We have remote controls for garage doors, TVs, even car doors! Machines clean our clothes and chop up our food. And instead of walking from point A to point B at the office to deliver a message, we now send it by e-mail. And how do we often get dinner? By driving up to the fast-food window. In other words, to get by in modern life, one need not physically exert himself.
     
So it’s easy, then, for an obese individual to believe he or she is healthy. But what if that person had to do what man once had to do, in order to get dinner – run across fields, climb, or dive in waters? What if our modern-day, “healthy and fit” obese people had to chop down a tree and build a canoe out of it? And then paddle for hours in the canoe? Before the invention of cars, people had to walk everywhere, including up and down hills, carrying buckets of water or carrying kids (strollers do that now). The obese or even moderately overweight person would not last long under these circumstances of yesteryear.
    
And when the very heavy person eventually must exert himself, he pays dearly for it, such as passing out after walking for extended periods in the heat, or awakening with searing back pain the day after rearranging some furniture (though a thin person can also suffer these fates; but the overweight person is at a greater disadvantage).
    
I once saw on the TV show, “Moral Court,” a debate that involved a representative of NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance). Again, it’s one thing to fight for protection in, for instance, the workplace against discrimination directed towards obese people. But the representative, who, by my visual estimate, weighed in at around 400 pounds, claimed to be very healthy because her blood pressure was normal, and that she “chased” her 6-year-old grandson around all day.
    
First of all, low blood pressure does NOT mean you are healthy. It simply means that you can scratch this risk factor off of your list of risk factors for stroke. Period. Secondly, there are many exaggerations in life, and one of them is the claim of “chasing around” a child “all day long.” This particular woman had difficulty making her way down the aisle towards her lectern!
    
When Mo’nique’s knees start giving out on her long before they really have to, I wonder if she will still believe that big is beautiful. Confidence and self-assuredness do not lower risk of disease.

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