WeightLoss. - Maybe you ever hear the question for weight loss, Gaining Weight or Losing It Which Costs More? This is really overweight can be pricey, too. The costs of being overweight or obese show up in the form of expensive medical care and lost income. But from a purely monetary standpoint, which costs more: packing on the pounds or taking them off? Here’s the breakdown.
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The Cost of Weight Gain
Gaining weight often happens so slowly that many costs are hard to detect. Buying bigger clothes is only slightly more expensive than buying smaller clothes, and unhealthy food tends to cost less than a healthy diet. The real costs associated with weight gain come over time.
Medical Costs: There are competing numbers for how much obesity affects medical costs for individuals, but none of the findings are pretty.
Prescriptions: Although prescriptions are technically a medical cost, they are a regular part of many peoples’ budgets. In 2003, obese Medicare beneficiaries with BMIs of 30 to 34.9 spent on average about $600 more per year on prescription drugs than non-obese beneficiaries, according to Medicare data analyzed by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.
Lost Income: In the workplace, obese women fare much worse than obese men. The number of obese American women goes up as the income amount goes down, according to the National Center of Health Statistics.
The Cost of Losing Weight
Like most things, there are costly ways to lose weight and there are inexpensive ways, and what works best depends entirely on the individual. Regardless of the approach, however, losing weight does seem to provide significant financial benefits on top of all the physical and emotional ones.
Fitness: Working out can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. The average gym membership in the United States costs $58, according to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, but no-frills gyms such as Planet Fitness and Charter Fitness start at just $10 per month (plus a usual start-up fee of about $20 or more, which you can often avoid with various promotions and deals).
Diet: According to research from Harvard and Brown Universities, healthy food costs a little more than unhealthy food per calorie. In a paper published in 2013, researchers estimated the costs of eating healthy, nutrient-dense foods versus low-nutrient “junk” foods and found that for a 2,000 calorie diet, healthy food costs $1.50 more than unhealthy food each day.
Prescriptions: Just as additional prescriptions for obesity-related conditions will cost you more, the reverse is true. Researchers at the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery found that adults who lost weight from bariatric surgery reduced prescription spending by 22 percent over four years.
The Takeaway
Weight loss comes with upfront costs that can be hard to take all at once, but becoming or staying overweight or obese will cost you much more over time. It’s difficult to be “fit and fat,” as many chronic diseases are associated with obesity, and nearly all of them require significant amounts of money to manage.
The Article Source : "Which Costs More: Gaining Weight or Losing It?"
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