It’s one of those things we all tell ourselves: that you may be a bit overweight, but are still in great health. After studying the notion of benign obesity, experts say not so fast.

“When you sugar coat recommendations, people take them half-heartedly. They go home feeling like well it’s not really that much of a problem, so I don’t have to work on it that aggressively,” says Dr. Lacagnina, who is the vice president of health and wellness for Lee Memorial Health System.

The Journal of the American College of Cardiology published the findings of British researchers who tracked more than 2,000 people for two decades and found that more than half of those initially considered fat but fit, eventually developed serious health problems.

“People don't realize the gravity of the situation. They develop a heart attack, they go into a hospital, they have bypass surgery and they come out of the hospital and they go back to their old lifestyle. And that’s usually because we haven’t done the best job of educating them that it was the lifestyle that created the problem,” says Dr. Lacagnina.

There is a way to look into the future: an evaluation for metabolic syndrome. It’s a collection of symptoms, when put together create a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. Key indicators are high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high bad cholesterol, low good cholesterol and belly fat.

“If we’re looking for one thing that will make a difference in the whole metabolic syndrome, just changing your diet,” Dr. Lacagnina says.

Faced with the prospect of future decline- it pays to downsize-before the weight weighs you down.

View More Health Matters video segments at leememorial.org/healthmatters/

Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of medical care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For nearly a century, we’ve been providing our community with everything from primary care treatment to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.

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