But my blood-test results are great!

Obesity is a bit like smoking: the tumours don’t start growing right after the first cigarette. For someone who is naturally prone to lung problems, it might take five years. Another person’s lungs might be able to take fifty years of constant damage. But just because the damage isn’t visible, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. A relatively recent analysis from 2013 investigated the long-term consequences of obesity with the specific aim of examining so-called healthily obese people. A comparison between healthy people of normal weight and healthy but obese subjects showed that the latter group had a significantly higher risk of dying or developing cardiovascular disease. The scientists who carried out the study therefore came to the conclusion that the belief that you can be ‘fat but fit’ is just a myth (Kramer et al.).

A still more recent study by Bell et al. (2015) confirmed those results. It followed supposedly healthily obese subjects over 20 years and found that more than half became unhealthily obese in the course of that time. Their risk of becoming ill was eight times higher than that of the healthy group with normal weight.

A Korean study covering 15,000 test subjects came to a similar conclusion: obese people with good blood-test results were found to be more likely to suffer from coronary artery calcification, leading to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease (Chang et al., 2014).

A study by Appleton et al. (2013) also showed that ‘healthily obese’ people had twice the risk of developing bad blood-test results or diabetes within five years when compared to people of normal weight.

In this context it should also be noted that these studies compared the healthiest obese people with healthy people of normal weight, meaning there was already a degree of preselection. Overweight and obese people more generally also includes people with risk factors such as high blood pressure or increased cholesterol levels. These tests only show that obese people with blood-test results within the normal range still have a higher risk of illness or death due to their extra body fat. As for the rest — they’re even worse off, health-wise.