Dieting and the Fight Against Obesity

Child and adult obesity is now acknowledged as a major international problem. Overweight and grossly overweight people account for a significant proportion of the population in many Western countries, and the governments of the UK, Canada, and the US are all intent on fighting the problem of excess weight and poor diet.

In the UK, as recently as July 2006, the Prime Minister Tony Blair declared child obesity (with a Body Mass Index of over 30) as the number one health challenge the country faces. In Canada, the government statistics reveal 23% of the adult population were recently described as obese, with 8% of children being in the same category when it came to their weight. In the US, Data from the National Center for Health Statistics show that 30 percent of American adults are obese.
This increase is not limited to adults. The percentage of young people who are overweight has more than tripled since 1980. Among children and teens aged 6–19 years, 16 percent (over 9 million young people) are considered overweight.

All major governments are taking the matter of diet seriously, and a useful source of information on the subect is the US Government's own Food Pyramid website. The food pyramid helps you to ascertain a healthy diet for you personally and then monitor it on a regular basis. The use of the food pyramid site is not confined to Americans only.

Here at Routes to Self Improvement, we acknowledge that health and diet are a primary issue. There is little point in improving yourself at various levels and in different ways, only to watch your health decline. Whatever self improvement interest you may have, your diet and health should be addressed in tandem.

On this site, the diet section of our own Routes to Self Improvement website, we cover some of the best known diets, such as South Beach Diet, Mediterranean Diet and Atkins Diet, as well as lesser known or newer diet plans such as the Sonoma Diet.