Practical Tips:

1. Recognize that obesity is a disease. While most epidemics can be defeated with a pill or vaccine, obesity requires people to change the way they eat and live.

2. Eat healthy. Include fruits, green vegetables, cereals, and whole grain foods in your daily diet. Avoid sweets, fried, pack-aged and refined foods. Eat small meals.

3. Set aside at least 30 minutes every day for cardiovascular exercise. Walking, jogging, running, cycling and swimming are great for weight loss.

4. Ignore popular quick-fix weight loss methods unless they are medically supervised. This category includes fad diets, weight loss pills, and powders and fat burning machines.

5. Become a non-smoker.

6. Avoid drinking. Most forms of alcohol contain a high percentage of fat.

Reverse the clock. Discouraging as this state of health might be, remember that you are a not a lost cause. Give life a second chance. There are effective solutions; from lifestyle modification, diet and exercise on one end of the spectrum to bariatric surgery on the other.

Don’t get defeated by obesity. Just fight it with determination. Never lose hope.