If you break a sweat and work out at the gym to say goodbye to parrots, you’ll be delighted to know that you’re not only on your way to looking slimmer : eliminating them also adds years to your life. For starters, for every four inches in your waistline that you reduce, the risk of your heart failure will decrease by 29% , as read in early 2016 in the journal Circulation . This is because those unsightly fat floaters worsen the function of our blood vessels and make it difficult for the arteries to expand .
On the other hand, you should not forget that, according to an investigation by the Massachusetts General Hospital, these roundings favor bone deterioration and osteoporosis, both in women and in men. Nor that recent studies link abdominal fat to the development of asthma or depression and a 3.6 times greater risk of suffering from memory loss and dementia as we age.
Even if the scale indicates that the weight is within what is considered normal, wearing love handles increases the mortality rate from any cause , as shown by studies from Imperial College London and the Mayo Clinic, in the United States. At the end of the day, not only does it matter how much adipose tissue you store, but, above all, where the undesirable deposits are located. Hence, experts recommend that, in addition to weighing ourselves, we use the tape measure to determine if we carry more unhealthy fat than we can. A fact: a waist of more than one hundred centimeters in women or 120 cm in men doubles the chances of dying prematurely compared to sizes of 65 cm and 80 cm, respectively.
