I just saw a post from Webmd stating that for every pound of weight you lose, you relieve 4 pounds of pressure from your joints.
While this is technically true, the implication here is that issues like joint degeneration, chronic pain and inflammation are a direct result of being overweight, and that losing weight is the answer.
This is just not true. Your skeleton is designed to support many times your body weight. Unless you are morbidly obese, carrying a little extra weight is not the reason you are suffeting from joint problems.
Unsustainable movement patterns are.
When your body feels that it is in a constant state of threat, it loses the ability to move fluidly and properly utilize outside forces to move and propel it through space.
When this happens, your body resorts to locking down the local stabilizing muscles around your joints in order to protect you.
This is an ok strategy in the short term, but in the long run it has a severe cost – leading to spasm, trigger points, joint compression, inflammation, and tissue degeneration over time.
While it is a good idea to be mindful of our weight and how it relates to our health, it is not helpful to think that your pain and joint problems are all because you don’t have the body of a fitness model or because you like to pig out on pizza and ice cream every once in a while.
Enough of our culture is geared toward making us feel ashamed of our weight and body type, we don’t need the medical community piling on as well.
By Dan Vidal