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Fitness is a way of life.

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20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Obesity (@discover.com)

Two of the more interesting items on this list of “things you didn’t know about obesity” are related:

2. According to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, nearly half the 4,000 people responding to an online survey about obesity said they would give up a year of their life rather than be fat.

3. Between 15 percent and 30 percent also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.

I watched part of Supersize Me last night and am struck with the irony of those statistics.  Becoming obese before the age of 17 may irreversibly decrease a person’s lifespan by several years, but people would give up a year of their life to not be obese?  People would rather be alcoholic than obese, but they are doing the same damage to their liver as alcoholics endure?

I realize Supersize Me isn’t the highest-regarded source of accurate statistics, but consider this - I was morbidly obese at 268lbs in September of last year, and was just over 200 by December.  Why lament about giving up a year of your life when you can live through three months of changing your lifestyle, become fit and learn some valuable lessons about yourself to boot?

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