Right decisions in lifestyle help health become lifelong friend
Rather than just worry about weight, what people are concerned about is their health and well-being. That is the bigger picture than the numbers on the scale which do not mater
Calls for lifestyle modifications in order to rule out lifelong diseases, which, in the first place are avertable, have been going on in the past 20 years and a visiting health and wellness specialist from Australia has pointed out that the solution actually comes from the person.
On Thursday and over at the King’s College Hospital London (Dubai Hills), Hepatology/ Gastroenterology/interventional Endoscopy consultant Dr. Farooq Khan told Gulf Today that the answer to the alarming global rates of obesity and related ailments such as faty liver of which he has dealt with since 2008 as a hepatologist and for which in general - the 183-year-old health institution, originating from a workhouse in Holborn, London - has become one of the world’s top three liver transplant centres with a “generous donation” from Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Founding Father of the United Arab Emirates - “is not just a team of (multidisciplinary medical) doctors but also a team of allied health (professionals) to support our patients.”
World Health Organisation worldwide recent records revealed 650 million obese adults with 340 million teenagers and 39 million young children.
Khan stressed that the “more important is the focus” on the underlying avoidable causes of overweight and obesity, citing that in the UAE for instance, while one in five are diabetic, “one in three are suffering from faty liver “that normally takes anywhere between 12 and 13 years to reach a damaged liver” leading to transplantation.
“The thing is, it is teaching people that there is no such thing as a magic pill. It is not going to work. If people think that they have surgery today and go home tomorrow and suddenly they lose their weight and so they are going to be happy; it is not going to happen. The first thing we have to do is change the mindset around the why. Why do you need to come and have a treatment for weight loss; whether is it non-surgical or surgical. The thing is, what do you want to look like in five, 10, 30 years. Take to think of your reason for having that intervention,” Felicity Cohen said.
Fear of “co-morbidities in relation to excess weight” is one reason. Cohen added: “Is it you want to have more time with your children; go to the beach, be more comfortable in wearing a swimsuit in the summer. Is that what you want out of your life? These are the things we need to understand first and where you want to be in the future, if you do not address the problem that you have now.”
“Rather than just worry about weight, what we are concerned about is our health and well-being. (That) is the bigger picture than the numbers on the scale (which) do not mater. What maters is, are we living the best of our lives,” Cohen also said.
The Journalism graduate who went for a career shit in the medical administration for bariatric surgery established the Weight Loss Solutions Australia (WLSA) 22 years back in Queensland. She had two close encounters with obesity and active lifestyle brought about by her “morbidly obese mother” who had passed on at a facility and a swimming team member “avante-garde” grandmother who lived through her nineties.
Cohen She is in the UAE for her first international venture which is with the hospital whose management has known and believes in the WLSA expert approach to combating obesity.
The partnership agreement was signed by hospital chief executive officer (CEO) Kimberly Ann Pierce and Cohen, also the WLSA CEO on Thursday. Witnesses other than Khan were General/laparoscopy/bariatric surgeon Dr. Ahmed Hassn and Endocrinology/diabetology consultant Dr Emran Ghaffar Khan.
Commented Pierce, who, Cohen said learnt of WLSA while in Australia, mentioned the National Health Survey in the UAE: “As of 2019, 27.8 per cent of adults are obese and two-thirds of the UAE population is in an unhealthy (Body Mass Index) range. It is important that we provide people with the help they need through effective weight loss treatments and strategies so that they cannot only lose weight but are also able to successfully keep it off in the long term.”
R