Prevent COVID-19 Infections & Severity with Medically-Supervised Healthy Weight Loss in San Francisco Bay Area
Prevent COVID-19 infections & more serious COVID-19 infections in you and your loved ones with a healthy weight loss plan from JumpstartMD. With the novel SARS CoV-2 coronavirus and associated COVID-19 infections in our midst, many are asking what they can do to avoid infection and therefore dutifully and smartly following recommendations such as spatial distancing, masks, handwashing, and more.
At the same time, even with sensible precautions, one may still become infected. When that happens, some will have no or minimal symptoms while others will become severely ill, hospitalized, or both. People more vulnerable to the latter more serious infections share many characteristics, some of which one can’t control (like older age) but many that one can. Listen to Dr. Sean Bourke, Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Jumpstart-MD discuss how underlying health conditions like obesity can contribute to the severity of the illness when someone contracts Covid-19.
Effective & Rapid Clinically Supervised Weight Loss Outcomes with JumpstartMD
What steps can you take today to prevent a more serious COVID-19 infection from threatening your health, livelihood, or worse yet, your life?
The answer is that there are many proactive things you can do to protect yourself and quickly, particularly with the support of a program with rapid and effective outcomes like we’ve demonstrated at JumpstartMD. In short, now has never been a better time to take-action to protect you and your loved ones from risk of more serious coronavirus infection if you’re exposed. On that front, we can help.
What Can You Do to Prevent More Serious COVID-19 Infection if Exposed?
What are those things you can do? Of course, prevention of infection in the first place is critical and some of those measures have already been noted. But second, it’s important to understand what conditions convey increased risk of serious infections and, of those, which ones you can control.
Let’s start with risk factors for more serious coronavirus infections. First off among them is age with older aged people being much more vulnerable to serious infections. At the same time, age is not something we can control other than to make sure we are doing our best as individuals and a society to protect vulnerable, older populations from exposure to infection.
But what about “modifiable” risk factors, those that you can do something about?
First among those is excess weight and obesity (the latter defined as a BMI or body mass index over 30 kg / meter squared). According to two studies published in Diabetes Care, those with obesity were at least 3 times more likely to have a severe case of the COVID-19 than those with normal weight.
The Obesity Epidemic & COVID-19: 3 out of 4 Americans are Overweight or Obese,
Today, obesity is all too common, having grown from a stable prevalence of around 12% for decades up until the 1960’s to now epidemic proportions wherein nearly 3 out of 4 Americans are overweight or obese, nearly half or 42.4% of adult Americans are obese, and 9.2% of adult Americans are severely obese (BMI over 40 kg / meter squared) according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And yet, excess weight or obesity can be effectively treatable with the right personal support and accountability in conjunction with a delicious nutritional path composed of whole, real, and fresh foods individualized to your likes and dislikes. That’s what we deliver at JumpstartMD.
The result; as much as 10 pounds or 5% weight loss in the first month of care. Now 5% weight loss might not seem like a lot of weight loss and yet it’s the amount that the Institute of Medicine considers “clinically significant” and the Food and Drug Administration uses as a cutoff for approval of a drug or medical device. Why? Because as little as 5% weight loss sustained can decrease the risk of developing type II diabetes by 57%. Not bad given we deliver that degree of weight loss, on average, to all comers to JumpstartMD in the FIRST MONTH.
And that’s not all, by the 3rd month, we deliver nearly 10% weight loss on average (and more for heavier, higher risk groups). That means that if you are 180 pounds today, you could be about 160 pounds in 3 months or if 200 pounds 180 pounds in 3 months, etc. with the right motivation, care path, and support structure.
Lose Weight Quickly & Build a Healthy Lifestyle to Prevent COVID-19 Infection
Know that what we’re providing is not a silver bullet overnight fad solution. Such an approach wouldn’t be appropriate anyway as most people didn’t put their weight on overnight either and fad diets simply don’t work in the short or long-term. Instead, we have a program that delivers rapid initial losses to keep motivation high at the same time that you are consuming delicious, whole real fresh foods so you don’t feel deprived, losing weight quickly, restoring your metabolic health, and building the foundation for a healthy and sustainable lifestyle that will protect you not only against the current pandemic but future ones yet unseen.
So why weight (pun intended)? If one ever needed an incentive to lose weight in addition to reasons previously considered, COVID-19 adds the urgency. In short, now is the time to take action.
Excess weight is a common risk factor for serious coronavirus infections
But if obesity or excess weight is a common risk factor for serious coronavirus infections, know that it’s not the only one in our midst. In fact, with only 12.2% of Americans being considered “metabolically healthy” today (NHANES survey data), the nearly 9 out of 10 metabolically unhealthy adults are part of another reversible and treatable epidemic that makes individuals and our society more vulnerable to serious COVID-19 infections. Not surprisingly, excess weight and metabolic ill health are related.
Think about it this way. Excess weight is the tip of the iceberg, the physical manifestation of the metabolic imbalance that you can see. But when you look “under the hood” of our body into its internal state of health (by measuring “biomarkers” like blood tests, belly fat volume, and blood pressure, for example), we uncover lots of other conditions for which excess weight is a “risk factor,” and all of which overlap and amplify the risk of serious COVID-19 infections. Examples of such hidden metabolic imbalances includes high blood pressure (hypertension), type II diabetes and pre-diabetes, heart disease (coronary artery disease, the # 1 killer in the country), and kidney dysfunction. Put them together, here’s what happens: obesity X diabetes X hypertension = 3 fold higher risk of serious coronavirus infections. Note: under the right care and personalized guide path, all of those conditions are reversible, treatable, improvable with healthy lifestyle changes.
Obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure increase COVID-19 infection
But why, might you be asking, would those individual common conditions or that triad of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure increase COVID-19 infection risk so much? What do they share?
Without getting too technical, these conditions are manifestations, at their core, of an underlying dysfunction of our main energy storage hormone, insulin, through a condition known as “insulin resistance.”
Insulin resistance creates vulnerability to serious COVID-19 infections for a host of reasons: One, it accelerates aging so that your “chronologic age” (age in years) underestimates your biologic age (the “physiologic” age of your body and internal organs). That amplifies one’s risk of serious coronavirus infections even at younger ages because people with insulin resistance don’t act their age (so to speak) biologically. Want to be younger next year? Restore your metabolic good health! Two (and also related), the metabolic ill health of insulin resistance creates underlying chronic, systemic inflammation in the body. Why is chronic, systemic inflammation important? In the end, people who die of COVID-19 don’t die from the virus. They die from the body’s inflammatory response to the virus. With insulin resistance your body is already chronically inflamed and imbalanced. COVID tips people predisposed to that dysfunction further. Three (and more extreme in the setting of full blown and poorly controlled diabetes), the cells in our body that fight infection are less effective (almost simulating an “immunocompromised” state, another risk factor for serious COVID-19 infections).
COVID-19 Risk: Over half of Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic! 80% to 90% of obese adults have (non-alcoholic) fatty liver disease!
Think this condition might not affect you or a loved one in America today? Think again. Today over 50% of Americans are either diabetic (14.3%) or pre-diabetic (38% and yet 90% don’t know they have it). Together, that’s 52.3% of Americans as diabetic or pre-diabetic. To boot, 34% of American adults (and nearly half over the age of 60) have metabolic syndrome, another pre-diabetic imbalance.
What’s more, (non-alcoholic) fatty liver disease is present in around 30% of adults; 60% of overweight adults, and 80% to 90% of obese adults! Fatty liver disease is another sign of metabolic ill health that one can think as “pre-diabetes in the liver,” an oft ignored and silent metabolic cry for help let forth by a mute canary living in the depths of our body’s coalmine, the liver and portending downstream development of diabetes. There’s a reason it’s called the “liver”. For the liver supports a foundation for good living and lives.
At their core, all of these epidemic chronic diseases in America today share obesity as risk factor and insulin resistance as root cause. They’re present, quite literally, everywhere, diagnosed or not. And they make you, our citizens, and thus, our society, more vulnerable to a host of diseases best avoided, among them various cancers, heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s and microvascular dementia, and, of clear and present significance, serious coronavirus infections.
So what can you do?
While the JumpstartMD program helps people lose weight quickly and very effectively, it goes beyond that, too, to restore metabolic health, as an inter-related byproduct of returning people to a healthy diet and weight. So, yes, we’ll address the external tip of the iceberg or your weight at the same time that, as clinicians, we can also look “under the hood” to monitor improvements in metabolic imbalances that predispose people to risk of serious COVID-19 infections. Metabolic syndrome: resolved. Pre-diabetes: resolved. Fatty liver disease: resolved. Type II diabetes: reversed to pre-diabetes or in remission off medication without signs of diabetes. Hypertension: improved (8 points, on average, in 6 months, an amount similar to a blood pressure medication); abdominal adiposity (or belly fat) reduced in circumference over an inch per month or 7 inches total at 6 months.
Those are life changing and terrific results, not solely for prevention of serious coronavirus infections but to improve quality of life, help you reduce or eliminate various medications you might be on today, and to shorten the list of diseases outlined at your primary care doctor both today and tomorrow.
And those results are delivered with kind and expert human support and healthy medical nutrition therapy (read as delicious whole foods) designed to reverse those metabolic and outward imbalances associated with the above conditions, whether obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, fatty liver – or other signs of COVID risk related and yet treatable metabolic dysfunction.
Fear of serious coronavirus infection may have a silver lining!
Yes, COVID-19 can be deadly. At the same time, that fear of serious coronavirus infections may have a silver lining. For COVID-19 has exposed the vulnerable underbelly of our metabolic ill health and waist lines in a way that creates an opportunity to use that knowledge and motivation to empower people at risk into actions and therapies that will quickly and materially reduce their risk of serious coronavirus infections and other common and debilitating downstream diseases. Again, if you ever needed an excuse to lose weight and optimize your health and well-being, now is the time. We can help and YOU CAN DO IT. Call 855 JUMPSTART to change your life – and for the better – today.
JumpstartMD Article References:
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Link between obesity, other metabolic conditions, and inflammation to increase likelihood of suffering from more serious COVID-19 infections
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