Health Complications of Being Underweight and Effective Ways to Gain Healthy Weight
There is significant attention in the medical community on the problems related to being overweight and obese, which is completely normal because of the magnitude of the issues associated with these conditions.
But underweight is appeared to be a condition that also deserves attention due to statistics. According to the World Health Organization, 1.9 billion adults are overweight or obese, while 462 million are underweight.
One worldwide study figures that around 8.8 percent of men and 9.7 percent of women are underweight, as their BMI is under 18.5.
However, certain health risks of underweight may grow up in more health complications, which, as over time, can worsen a person’s life quality, causing further severe problems.
How Do You Know if You’re Underweight?
Underweight is frequently specified through BMI – body mass index. For the underweight person is considered that he is with too low body weight to be healthy. His BMI score is under 18.5, and his weight is 15% to 20% below the standard for his age and height group.
If your BMI is under 18.5, it shows that you’re underweight. Keep in mind that If you look thin with BMI 18.5-20, you’re not yet considered underweight, but you can’t afford to lose more kilos because you are too close to the risk zone.
Are you worry about your BMI? You can use this BMI Calculator to check your actual BMI figure and find out precisely what BMI category you fall in.
Most Common Reasons For Underweight
A person may be underweight due to reasons such as:
- Metabolism disorders: The skinny people’s caloric intake is low, and the assimilation of essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are usually insufficient
- Hyper metabolism: increased rate of metabolic activity caused extreme weight loss.Poor eating habits: eating of empty calories (junk food); eating of low nutritional food-not taking in enough calories
- Eating disorders like bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa
- Malnutrition.Drug useLack of food (frequently due to poverty). 1 of 6 children in the U.S. is food insecure, and 14.3 million U.S. households experiencing food insecurity
- Genetic predispositions are also essential factors considering the causes of underweight
- Illnesses and Infirmities. Many severe diseases are the reason for poor digestion and low nutrient absorption, which also lead to underweight. They can have a substantial adverse effect on the person’s health so that to look thin or even skinny. Such as:
⁃ Overactive thyroid gland-Hyperthyroidism
⁃ Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
⁃ Gastrointestinal disorders such as Crown’s disease
⁃ Inflammatory bowel disease
⁃ liver infections
⁃ Tuberculosis
⁃ Cancer
What are the Health Risks of Underweight?
Malnutrition
If you are underweight, you may not consume enough healthy foods with essential nutrients to feed your body, which over time, can cause malnutrition.
Because your health is mainly dependent on nutrients from your diet, malnutrition, in general, can wreck your overall health, which undoubtedly would lead to even more health complications.
Your symptoms might include:
- feeling tired and with low energy levels
- getting sick frequently but also being with troubles to overcome the illness
- being with irregular or skipped periods in females
- experiencing hair loss and hair thinning, dry skin, and often teeth issues
A study(Source) made in Japan compared underweight women that have a strong desire to be thin with the same kind of underweight women but without this certain desire. They discovered that women with the wish to be thin are tended to have more unhealthy eating habits than skinny women without this desire.
If you are underweight, it is very likely also to be malnourished. This especially true if your low BMI is caused by a poor diet or an underlying disease that causes you poor nutrient absorption.
Moreover, malnutrition can further lead to anemia and a deficiency in the necessary vitamins. And in turn, the anemia also can be caused by not efficient nutrients’ absorption from your body.
Unstable and weak immune functions
Being too thin can weaken your immune system; you’re more exposed to getting illnesses or acquiring infections.
You might find yourself easy susceptible to get cold or flu, and the recovery time from such ailments is longer. If you are curing of illness or surgery, but you are underweight, it will slow down the recovery process.
An analysis announced in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2014 concluded that people whose BMI is 18.5 or lower have nearly twice higher risk of dying early than someone with a healthy BMI.
In general, your immune system demands the right quality vitamins and minerals to function most efficiently. The truth is that if you’re underweight, you may not be getting all or adequate amounts of these nutrients, including vitamins C, A, D, and E, along with the essential minerals iron, selenium, zinc, etc.
Further, factors such as overall body weakness, diminished muscle mass, hair loss can also occur and contribute to one’s overall frailty.
Increased risk of osteoporosis
Low body weight can raise your risk for low Bone Mineral Density (in short BMD) and the development of osteoporosis.
One study (Source) that explore at BMD in 1,767 premenopausal women, and point out that 24 percent of the women with a BMI of 18.5 or less had relevantly and a low BMD. Unlike, only 9.4 percent of participants with a BMI greater than 18.5 (healthy BMI) had low BMD. The study’s conclusions suggest that if a person is too thin or underweight, this boosts the risk of osteoporosis additionally.
Hormone complications from being underweight
Underweight ladies can experience hormone unbalance, but also they may have irregular menstruation or, even worse, a lack of menstruating at all.
Being underweight at all causes stress for your body, which in turn remodels and diminished hormone production. The reason is that your body starts to focus on other essential body functions that keep you alive instead of your hormones. Being with the abnormal hormonal flow, you’re at a more elevated risk of osteoporosis.
Irregular or missed menstrual periods may be a sign of anovulation, or that your body is not ovulating. Furthermore, chronic anovulation may lead to infertility.
Thus, underweight women are at higher risks for undergoing trough difficult pregnancy or make it hard to get pregnant.
If you don’t have enough body fat or aren’t getting enough nutrients, maybe your body likely senses that this is not a good time to reproduce, and it will be hard to support another life. According to researches impersonated at the 2011 American Society for Reproductive Medicine(in shore ASRM) the conference verified that women who are with BMI numbers between 14 and 18 had only a 34 percent possibility of a healthy baby.
Generally, being underweight while pregnant can bring risks for your baby. That’s why your doctor may suggest reaching a healthy weight before getting pregnant because it is vital to be and maintain a healthy weight during your pregnancy.
Anemia
The underweight people are at higher risk to be with lower and poor blood counts. A condition that is well known as anemia, which causes symptoms like headaches, dizziness, and tiredness.
Chronicle fatigue
Not getting adequate calories to maintain a healthy weight can make a person chronically fatigued as making him feel tired all the time. This because calories are a measure of the energy that you supply mainly through your food.
It means the lack of essential macro and micronutrients of your diet is a solid reason that would cause you to a state of low energy, a weak muscle tone, and a bad mood.
If malnutrition and poor eating habits cause you to be underweight, then making changes and adjustments to your diet would significantly improve your condition, which is a matter of will and desire from your side.
Overall nutritional deficiency may cause hair loss
One of the reasons can be low iron levels in your body. If you have difficulties in menstruation, but meanwhile, you are underweight and have a history of anemia, it is possible to experience hair loss from iron deficiency.
Some women take iron supplements to fight the condition, but there is no data to support their long-term effectiveness for hair loss.
According to some experts, if you are experience malnutrition, due to low protein intake may also undergo trough hair loss. At all, very-low-calorie diets, cannot provide enough nourishment of your body—which includes your hair follicles—to function normally(Source).
What is necessary to do
If you suspect you’re underweight, your doctor can check your medical history and help recognize any issues that may be leading to weight loss or poor nutrition.
If your doctor rules out any serious underlying medical issues, then you may come up with a plan to help you reach a healthy weight fast, safely, and effectively.
By making some tweaks to your lifestyle and diet, you can gain healthy weight and run away from the adverse health effects of being underweight.
So, if you want to take the next step would be helpful to find out about: