What will happen to you if you have 5 extra kilograms at the age of 30

When you are thirty, you are young and healthy, being overweight brings only aesthetic dissatisfaction and some tolerable difficulties when buying clothes. You don't think what awaits you in ten years. You spend hours lying on the couch and watching TV or sitting at the computer and do not want to limit yourself in pleasures and weaknesses.

Boring statistics from some "British scientists" about the increased risk of developing some diseases due to obesity tells you little. These are the stories of some other people, and you control everything exactly! Meanwhile, every year and every extra kilogram, your risk of developing these diseases increases steadily.

Maybe we should try to look into the future? So, if you are a thirty-year-old fat man (plus or minus five years), then in…

Plus 5 kg. You still continue to eat McDonald's burgers and a liter of Coca-Cola. And you don't understand at all why your head starts to ache periodically, when you run lightly to the bus or for a child, flies appear before your eyes and dizziness, sometimes there are attacks of weakness, and when you get excited, your face turns red and there is a feeling of a rush of blood to the head. For interest, having measured the pressure in the pharmacy, you are surprised to find the figures 140/80 millimeters of mercury, and maybe even higher (the norm at this age is 120/80 mm of mercury).

You go to the doctor, and he prescribes pills to reduce blood pressure. He also insistently recommends losing weight and doing physical education. You take pills irregularly, only if you feel unwell. Well, your "physical education" continues to be limited to jogging to the nearest stall with beer and chips.

Another plus 10 kg. The first emergency call due to an unbearable headache. The first hypertensive crisis is when the needle of the tonometer (a device for measuring blood pressure) rolls over 180 mm of mercury. You are taken to the emergency room of a local hospital, given an injection to reduce blood pressure, monitored for several hours and sent home under a subscription to refuse hospitalization.

At home, you lie flat in bed for three days, unable to move. You buy yourself a personal blood pressure monitor and start measuring your blood pressure regularly. It rarely falls below 140/90 mm of mercury. You start taking pills daily. Elevated cholesterol and sugar are found in the blood. The doctor, seeing your apple-shaped figure (deposits are more on the stomach, not on the hips), speaks of an increased risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis, the danger of heart attacks, strokes, and so on. The diet that you are trying to follow for the first two weeks is assigned. Then it becomes easier for you, the fear of a recurrent hypertensive crisis passes, you relax and continue to live as before. You are a master of self—persuasion and convince yourself of anything but the need to change your lifestyle!

However, after a while you notice that it becomes more and more difficult for you to climb the stairs. Knees hurt, shortness of breath and tingling in the heart appear already on the third floor. You read something on the Internet about osteoarthritis, osteochondrosis and coronary heart disease (this is when the heart muscle lacks oxygen and during exercise it begins to signal us with pain in the left half of the chest).

The idea that you need to do something comes to your mind more and more often. Comes... and goes…

Another plus 10 kg. The pressure is getting higher, there are even more pills on the bedside table. To maintain the pressure at a normal level, you have to take 5-8 different medications a day. Walking without heartache is getting shorter. Your knees hurt and crunch more and more, and now you can no longer get up from the chair without helping yourself with your hands, and in the morning you have a whole ritual of sliding out of bed so as not to aggravate back pain, knees and cause sudden dizziness. Blood sugar is steadfastly kept at an elevated level, and you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

The doctor strongly recommends to reduce weight and gives a leaflet with prohibited products. Everything that you so loved to eat on long autumn-winter-spring-summer evenings fell under a complete ban: sweets, sugar, flour, fatty, fried potatoes, carbonated drinks and so on. Cholesterol-lowering medications are prescribed. You are regularly met in the queue for a doctor's appointment, and the ambulance dispatcher already recognizes your voice. You go on a diet, suffer from hunger, but it becomes more and more difficult to lose weight.

The doctor at the fitness club that you finally decided to visit, after listening to your complaints and reviewing the diagnoses, recommends you a health group at the nearest polyclinic. The orthopedist suggests replacing knee joints with prostheses, which are already affected by arthrosis of the third degree. The neurologist prescribes a course of regular droppers and adds a couple more drugs to the bedside table in connection with the appearance of new complaints and cholesterol plaques in the vessels of the brain. More and more often it is necessary to seek help from loved ones to help them change clothes, put on socks (the stomach interferes), treat the skin in fat folds. Naturally, for a lady, high-heeled shoes have long been forgotten, and more and more often you have to take a cane with you even for short walks.

Myocardial infarction. The cholesterol plaque broke off and clogged one of the vessels feeding the heart. Unbearable chest pain, ambulance, intensive care unit or operating table. Long-term treatment, disability. Walking mainly to the clinic. Persistent headaches, shortness of breath, dizziness, pain and burning in the feet and the appearance of non-healing ulcers on the legs due to diabetes. Tablets are taken before, after and instead of meals. At night, sleep is periodically interrupted by the frightened voice of the spouse(s): "You stopped snoring, what's wrong with you?"

The doctor diagnoses obstructive apnea. Sometimes the total time without breathing is several hours per night! Constant awakenings, lack of oxygen, drowsiness during the day, deterioration of memory and attention — all this becomes the daily reality of a full person with Pickwick syndrome. Planned joint replacement surgery is canceled due to contraindications. You are offered to inject special drugs into your knees. Needles, in the knee ... the pain goes away, but not for long. After six months, you have to prick again. About the numerous hospitalizations, emergency rooms and calls of district therapists, let's just keep silent.

Here the future of today's slightly overweight guy or girl of 30 years is no longer visible. Probably, it just doesn't exist.

You're dead. At an age that in the modern world differs from the average age of death by several decades.

And this is not the worst scenario — everything can be much more terrible and sudden. The modern food industry, which has lost touch with reality, the fascination with a stationary lifestyle and lack of physical activity, in principle, can reduce the period of onset of the described finale by half, and maybe even more. If in the childhood of modern 30-40-year-olds at school there was one fat man, whom everyone mocked, then today, taking the child to the first grade, I see that a third of the students are overweight already in the first grade! That is, the story written about a 30-year-old fat man begins for them at the age of ten.

Three years ago in Thailand, I admired skinny nymph-like girls and women. Now I'm amazed how few of them are left. Thais got carried away by Western values and also adopted a destructive lifestyle and nutrition.

I have seen American schools and their students: a third of the children have a completely immense size, not typical even for a large adult, a third — with a clear excess weight and just pieces of fat on the body, a third are normal, healthy children. Only a third are the kind we see in Hollywood blockbusters. Sometimes you just wonder where producers and directors generally take the likes of Megan Fox, Emma Watson, Brad Pitt and Elijah Wood. It is unclear how in the future grown-up children who are disabled today will support our old age in 40-50 years. It's very scary. And discard the Russian habit of thinking like this: this is a story about some other people, other children… This is our story, and, as happened in Thailand in three years, it will come to us. She has already come, just look around carefully at last!

How can you deprive yourself of all this? How can we so foolishly exchange the only life given to us by nature, the only chance?