Weight can play a role in how you die, especially if you are extremely underweight or overweight. If you’re somewhere in the middle your death is unlikely to be the result of your weight per se, although if you die early it may be as a result of unhealthy lifestyle. Just being slim isn’t enough to guarantee good health, especially if you remain slim by smoking and skipping meals. On the other hand, just because you’re overweight doesn’t mean that you stuff your face with junk food all the time and never bother to exercise.
Clearly, then, unless you are at either extreme of being too fat or too thin it is more likely to be the lifestyle you lead that contributes to your death. You may be lucky enough to reach old age despite drinking too much alcohol and smoking, but you’re likely to be in the minority. The best way to live a long, healthy life is to ensure you eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly and avoid excessive drinking and smoking altogether.
Your weight may play a role in how you die if you’re overweight and got that way by living on junk food and never exercising. Junk food is crammed full of sugar, salt and fat, so you could be clogging up your arteries and increasing your chance of developing high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. However, this is can be the case for slim individuals as well. You may be lucky in the sense you can get away with eating whatever you want without gaining weight, but your diet will still have an impact on your overall health.
Of course, there are extreme cases where your weight actually is likely to play a direct role in how you die. If you suffer from an eating disorder and are carrying very little weight then your heart is likely to be wasting away, which leaves you at greater risk of a heart attack. You will have a very weak immune system and so even a minor cold can turn into something more serious. At the other end of the spectrum, being morbidly obese puts your heart under a great deal of strain and if you are unable to leave your bed you’re likely to keep putting more and more weight on, which only worsens the situation.
Thus, weight can play a role in the way you die, but in the majority of cases it is how people choose to live their lives which has an impact on their death rather than whether they are slim or overweight.