A recent study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has dubbed Britain the ‘fat man of Europe’, with nearly 25% of adults in the UK being obese, this being the highest level in Western Europe. Worryingly this figure has more than trebled in the last 30 years; in 1980 only 6% of men and 8% of women were considered obese. If this trend continues, on current estimates, it is suggested that more than half of the UK population could be obese by 2050.
A person is considered overweight if their Body Mass Index (BMI) is between 25 and 29 and they are categorised as obese if their BMI is over 30. If you take into consideration the number of adults in the UK who also fall into the ‘overweight’ category then it is reported that nearly 62% of UK adults have problems with their weight. This has caused Professor Terence Stephenson in Measuring Up, a report on the nation’s obesity crisis by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC), to claim that “it is no exaggeration to say that [obesity] is the biggest public health crisis facing the UK today.”
But why are so many people in the UK struggling with their weight and what can lavender essential oil do to help?
The obesity epidemic has been majority blamed on our modern lifestyles which include; our reliance on the car, watching too much TV, too much time spent in front of computers, desk-bound jobs and high-calorie foods. However weight gain can also be the result of a number of less easy to change factors. According to the US National Centre for Eating Disorders, generalized anxiety disorder and compulsive overeating are often hand-in-hand problems, the overeating being a result of the anxiety and it is here that some of our wonderfully velvety lavender essential oil can help.
Numerous studies have shown that inhaling the scent of lavender oil can induce calm and decrease feelings of anxiety. In fact one 2010 study compared the effects of lavender to lorazepam, a common anti-anxiety drug. The study found that, for many of the test subjects, lavender oil worked almost as well as the drug. And even if there is no clinical diagnosis of anxiety, high levels of stress can create an emotional trigger to comfort eat and again here the inhalation of lavender can induce that feeling of calm without resorting to high calorie foods.
So next time the craving hits, instead of reaching for the biscuit tin, why not reach for a little bottle of Jersey Lavender Essential Oil instead?
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