Signs and Symptoms

Signs are the effects of disease that a health care worker can note in their assessment (bruising, body shape, blood sugar, lung sounds, heart rate, etc). Symptoms are the patient's experience of a disease, and what they can report to a health care professional (pain, shortness of breath, changes in appetite or mood, difficulties moving, etc).

The central signs of obesity are body shape and BMI, as I discussed in a previous post. The patient's experience is usually not so straightforward. Weight gain is generally very slow, and so people may not realize how much their weight has increased until the day that they can't button their jeans anymore.

This video does a nice job of demonstrating how different things might be if significant weight gain was instant. An extra ten or twenty pounds makes a more noticeably significant impact when people don't have weeks and months to get used to the change.

 

 

Another result of obesity that can have an even more significant impact on people than just having to find bigger clothes is a sense of social stigmatization. Overweight is not the cultural standard of beauty - in fact, underweight often is. With new diets always surfacing, frequent news reports on America's obesity epidemic, and the judging glances of strangers, it is easy to understand how heavy social burden is that obese and overweight people carry. This symptom of obesity must not be overlooked.