Is loosing weight the key to your back pain?

If you look down while you are standing and you can’t see any part of your feet, your back pain may be caused, at least in part, by the belly fat you are carrying.  Very often I have patients come in with pretty severe back pain and tell me they have no idea of what caused their pain to start.  Meanwhile, they are 40 or 50 or even more pounds overweight much of it in the form of belly fat that is protruding forward.  All that extra weight can put a tremendous amount of alkward force that sits on the low back.  Then if you are sitting in a deep chair or maybe in bed, you may put enough torque on your low back that the disc starts to bulge.

At first this may cause no pain at all.  In order for pain to happen, the bulge has to be large enough to impact other tissues like nerves.  But, the weakness was created in the disc.  Now every time that you have a twisting motion in your low back while you are standing up (especially with the extra weight) the bulge has to opportunity to get a little bit bigger.  Then one day you may do something very minor, but it was enough to push the bulge over the threshold and now the low back has a lot of pain.

It is possible to get rid of most severe back pian without having to do surgery.  We use advanced chiropractic techniques along with

We have helped hundreds of patients do just that over the years, but if loosing some weight can help you avoid all that pain, isn’t it worth it to do that?

So if you are 35 years old or older and are carrying 30 or more pounds of extra weight – especially in your belly- it would be wise to drop that extra weight.  You could save yourself tons of pain and thousands of dollars in co-pays for a back surgery or even 2 or 3 in your future.