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It’s no mystery that carrying too much weight — and nearly three-quarters of Americans fit this bill — is bad for your health. From early onset arthritis to diabetes, no shortage of health conditions count being overweight or having obesity as a major risk factor.
Well, this risk factor is also a key one for cardiovascular disease, which includes serious heart diseases, such as heart attack and stroke. Given that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, it’s worth reducing your risks, including losing weight.
In this blog post, the team at Upper East Side Cardiology, under the guidance of board-certified cardiologist Dr. Satjit Bhusri, reviews how carrying excess weight can impact your heart health. Perhaps more importantly, we reveal how we can help you shed those unhealthy pounds to set a new course for your health.
Your weight and the cardiometabolic effect
There are many ways in which excess weight can impact your cardiovascular health, and we’ll start with what we call the cardiometabolic effect.
When you’re overweight or have obesity, it can cause shifts in your hormones (your metabolic health). For example, people who are overweight often develop insulin resistance, and the increasing ineffectiveness of their insulin hormones causes their blood sugar levels to become elevated. Not only can this lead to diabetes, but it can also damage blood vessels.
Also included in your cardiometabolic health are unhealthy lipid levels (cholesterol). People who are overweight often have unhealthy levels of low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), which can lead to plaque buildup in their blood vessels.
Making matters worse, poor cardiometabolic health often includes low high-density lipoprotein levels, and you need these lipoproteins to keep your LDLs in check.
Your weight and your blood pressure
Another byproduct of carrying too many pounds is high blood pressure. Your blood pressure is the amount of pressure blood is placing on the walls of your arteries during a heartbeat and in between heartbeats.
When you have high blood pressure, your arteries can stiffen, and your heart needs to work harder to deliver blood — all of which can place you in the line of fire for heart disease.
Your weight and sleep apnea
People who carry too much fat can accumulate it around their necks and throats, which can lead to obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). In fact, OSA affects about 25% of the general population, but this number jumps to 45% for people with obesity.
When you have OSA, your sleep is disrupted, which can raise your blood pressure and heart rate at night — times when your heart needs a rest. So, with OSA, you’re placing more pressure on your cardiovascular system, which can lead to poor heart health.
Losing weight for better heart health
We could go on and describe more ways in which your weight can influence your heart health, but we want to take this discussion in a more positive direction.
Losing unhealthy pounds has become much easier thanks to GLP-1 medications that curb your appetite and improve your blood sugar levels. And we’re pleased to offer this relatively new class of weight loss drugs at our practice.
The bottom line is that using these tools to lose unhealthy pounds can quite literally save your life, so it’s well worth your while to investigate whether this approach to weight loss will work for your needs.
So, if you’d like to improve your heart health through weight loss, please call our New York City office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at 212-752-3464. You can also request information online by clicking here.