Beware, low-fat diets can make you infertile #ontopnigeria
HAVE you often wrestled to zip up your jeans, cursing every bulge and bump in your body, or gazed longingly at all the skimpy tops in the shops wishing you had the figure to carry them off? It is a fact that a lot of women have dreamt of being skinny at some point in their lives, staring at pictures of impossibly slim models, wondering how different their lives could be if only they looked like these models.
Now experts have asked women to look at it another way. That you should try to imagine your life without your children. Or if you haven’t had children yet, without the possibility of ever having them. According to U.S. academic, Rose Frisch of Havard University, that’s the price many young women are paying for their dedication to staying slender. She has been studying the link between body fat and fertility for the last 20 years.
She believes that millions of healthy young women are making themselves infertile by sticking to low-fat diets. They are not anorexic. They still have regular periods. But according to what the professor calls her ‘critical fatness theory’, they are unknowingly switching off their reproductive systems by keeping themselves just slightly under weight. “Many women who maintain the body shape made popular on catwalks throughout the world are completely infertile”, says Professor Frisch. “These women can, however, continue having monthly periods and not guessing that anything is wrong with them until they try and fail to get pregnant.”
She explains her theory in full in a book called: Female Fertility and the Body Fact Connection. Body fat, she says, provides the energy for reproduction. Fall below the required level and your body will begin to restrict the flow of a hormone that is vital for reproduction. She warns that there is a frighteningly thin line between being a weight at which you can conceive and a weight at which you can’t.
“What I found most astonishing is that there’s a razor-thin borderline where losing just three pounds in weight can tip a normal-sized woman over into infertility without any outward sign at all that such an enormous event has taken place,” she said. She also warns that if you are under-weight, deciding to pile on a few pounds when you want to have a baby may not work. According to her, there may come a point at which it is too late to become fertile again by simply putting on weight. Professor Frisch continues:
“My work proves scientifically how important body fat is to a woman’s health, it is a wake up call to all those women who believe keeping super-lean is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, her message seems to be falling on deaf ears. And it isn’t just young women who are worryingly obsessed with their weight. Almost half of all our teenage girls think they’re too fat and want to be slimmer, according to another study published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology. Many experts blame this alarming finding on the cult of the ultra thin celebrity – from Face of Africa, Oluchi, to ex-Miss World, Agbani Darego. The report alleges that “our findings lend support to the view that children will develop cultural concepts of desirable physical attributes, particularly related to thinness, well before puberty.” The evidence seems to be clear, a woman shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed of womanly curves. A grown woman wasn’t meant to have a stomach as that as a washboard. Body fat is part of being fertile. It should be celebrated.
Now experts have asked women to look at it another way. That you should try to imagine your life without your children. Or if you haven’t had children yet, without the possibility of ever having them. According to U.S. academic, Rose Frisch of Havard University, that’s the price many young women are paying for their dedication to staying slender. She has been studying the link between body fat and fertility for the last 20 years.
She believes that millions of healthy young women are making themselves infertile by sticking to low-fat diets. They are not anorexic. They still have regular periods. But according to what the professor calls her ‘critical fatness theory’, they are unknowingly switching off their reproductive systems by keeping themselves just slightly under weight. “Many women who maintain the body shape made popular on catwalks throughout the world are completely infertile”, says Professor Frisch. “These women can, however, continue having monthly periods and not guessing that anything is wrong with them until they try and fail to get pregnant.”
She explains her theory in full in a book called: Female Fertility and the Body Fact Connection. Body fat, she says, provides the energy for reproduction. Fall below the required level and your body will begin to restrict the flow of a hormone that is vital for reproduction. She warns that there is a frighteningly thin line between being a weight at which you can conceive and a weight at which you can’t.
“What I found most astonishing is that there’s a razor-thin borderline where losing just three pounds in weight can tip a normal-sized woman over into infertility without any outward sign at all that such an enormous event has taken place,” she said. She also warns that if you are under-weight, deciding to pile on a few pounds when you want to have a baby may not work. According to her, there may come a point at which it is too late to become fertile again by simply putting on weight. Professor Frisch continues:
“My work proves scientifically how important body fat is to a woman’s health, it is a wake up call to all those women who believe keeping super-lean is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, her message seems to be falling on deaf ears. And it isn’t just young women who are worryingly obsessed with their weight. Almost half of all our teenage girls think they’re too fat and want to be slimmer, according to another study published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology. Many experts blame this alarming finding on the cult of the ultra thin celebrity – from Face of Africa, Oluchi, to ex-Miss World, Agbani Darego. The report alleges that “our findings lend support to the view that children will develop cultural concepts of desirable physical attributes, particularly related to thinness, well before puberty.” The evidence seems to be clear, a woman shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed of womanly curves. A grown woman wasn’t meant to have a stomach as that as a washboard. Body fat is part of being fertile. It should be celebrated.