“Have you noticed the growing number of teenage girls with love handles nowadays?” read the email from a colleague.
‘Love handles’ are just a polite name for a potbelly if you’re wondering.
It
was interesting because I too had noticed this. Young, flawless faces,
but when your eyes dropped to the midsection, the shock of protruding,
sagging bellies that looked out of place in an otherwise young-looking
body.
Jennifer Muiruri/ Nation
http://www.nation.co.ke/Features/saturday/Young-women-and-beer-bellies--/-/1216/963230/-/sc5ofpz/-/index.html
I forwarded the email to a couple of colleagues
and friends and surprise, surprise; they too had noticed the increasing
number of young women struggling to cover bellies that threatened to
spill over from the waistlines of their trendy jeans.
“Blame
it on junk food, alcohol, our nyama choma culture and what I call the
couch potato syndrome,” says Kepha Nyanumba, a nutritionist
with AAR.
According to Kepha, most of today’s young people have embraced
an unhealthy lifestyle, a disastrous menu of junk food, too much red
meat, excess alcohol and fizzy drinks coupled with inactivity.
And
how true that is. Wander into any pub in the city centre on a Friday or
Saturday evening and you will notice groups of young girls, most of
them in their late teens or early 20s downing bottle after bottle of
beer.
Nyama choma is no longer the elderly man’s meal,
so they will have already had their fill of roast meat to ‘line’ the
stomach as they prepare for a long night.
Most of them
would also tell you that before popping into the pub for the ‘main
course’, they had passed by a fast food joint for a plate of chips and
fried chicken.
Exercise is, of course, a foreign word in their vocabulary.
“Fat tends to be stored around the waist in women,” says Kepha.
Forget
aesthetics for a moment, most of the body’s vital organs are found
here, and too much fat deposit around this section interferes with their
proper functioning.
Unknowingly, while these young
women meet every weekend to “do Nyama” or join the long queue of
predominantly young people who take advantage of a weekly offer to
‘buy-one-pizza-get-one-free’ at a popular fast food restaurant in the
city centre, they are setting themselves up for future infertility, and
diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and a host of
cardiovascular diseases.
It is also worth noting that
the rate of metabolism in men is higher than that in women. According to
Kepha, men break down fat faster than women.
This
means that when women in their early 20s compete with their male
companions for the two kilos of nyama choma and ugali, which they then
wash down with several bottles of beer, the damaging effects of this
deadly menu are likely to show themselves sooner in the fairer sex.
Kepha
points out that though your average young woman is conscious of her
looks, this does not make her immune to the lure of junk food, which,
besides being tastier, is also cheaper than nutritionally-healthy food
and therefore friendlier to their pockets.
“Generally,
most young women are conscious about their looks and will do just about
anything, including starving themselves to portray a certain image.”
Take
bulimia nervosa for instance, which Kepha singles out as common in
young women. It is characterised by recurrent binge eating, which one
then tries to compensate for by fasting, vomiting, or over-exercising.
It, of course, does not work because the damage is already done.
What
is the way out then? There is no short cut to losing weight
unfortunately, or getting rid of the dangerous fat around the waist. You
just have to eat healthy and exercise.
Unless young women embrace a healthy lifestyle now, the problem will be much more than an expanding waistline.
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