Dr. Phil: Obesity's a disease, and I'm the cure

[SamSpade]

Here's a thought - how hard do you think you could exercise, if by being fat, you already had a resting heart rate above 100? How far do you think you could jog or how many pull-ups do you think you could do, if I attached two 80-lb bags of cement to you? How vigorously could you exercise if your blood pressure was already 160/110?

People aren't born fat. Due to any number of circumstances, they begin to gain weight. For me, the first instigating factor was back trouble. This happened in my 30's when I was already slowing down, even though I played softball twice a week, swam a mile twice a week, and played a few hours of doubles volleyball EVERY day of the week. In high school I ran 12-15 miles a day, and for several years after college, I found myself in construction, and I was in good shape. Then I injured my back. While it is not the only reason I gained weight, not being able to move much for more than a year will defintely put pounds on you.

My sister gained an enormous amount of weight in a short time due to the onset of Cushing's syndrome. Years later, and after the removal of a brain tumor, she still suffers from nausea and fatigue, and without a working thyroid, has great difficulty losing weight.

If you're somebody who has NEVER been seriously overweight, you haven't the faintest idea of how difficult a task it is. Statistics show that better than 95% of all people WHO *SUCCEED* in shedding those extra pounds gain it all back.

There are any number of reasons. One is insulin resistance. Your body resists the effects of insulin in your body as you gain weight. So the carbs that previously would have provided instant energy because it gets loaded into your cells as sugar never arrives, and thus is made into fat instead. A thin person eats some pasta, and they're wired to go; fat person eats the SAME amount, it knocks them out and they never get the benefit of the extra energy.

There are other consequences. One is sleep apnea, which nearly ALL overweight people experience. These are fairly long intervals while you sleep, that you stop breathing. Aside from the danger of stroke or heart attack, this means diminished lung capacity, and when the overweight person awakes after a fitful night of sleep, they're still tired.

I really could go on. I'm tired of remarks that suggest that the way so many fat people remain that way is continued gorging. I've not witnessed this, nor have most people who have seen me eat. I typically eat less than most of my thinner friends, and one of them is always looking at me and wondering "how can you eat so damned little and still be fat?".

What is great though, is there are any number of good, medical solutions to reverse all of this. Classifiying it as a "disease" allows treatment BEFORE it gets bad.

I do not give a rat's azz about how being overeight makes me LOOK. I'm far more concerned about DYING. I'm tired of the back pain, the joint pain, the stomach nausea, the awful pain in the my feet every minute of every day, the lack of stamina, the fatigue, the muscle aches, the extra sweating and headaches that last all day. I'm tired of not being able to bend and reach things. I'm tired of how uncomfortable nearly all furniture is, and having to be concerned if it will even HOLD ME UP. I'm tired of having such poor circulation I frequently have numb extremities and very slow healing of any kind of wound. I'm tired of how susceptible I've become to almost any illness. You want more? I could describe some things that would make you sick just reading them.

I'm not sure how to keep mentioning - if you're a mere 10 lbs overweight, sure, you can lose it. I was able to do that, easy. It is something different when it's 100.

 

[Toxick]

Originally posted by Sharon
In general, society accepts men who are overweight more readily than women. Factor in - air brushed models...who can compete with that? Women give up.

I was in the situation not too long ago where I was in the company of several women. I wasn't talking much, just kind of sitting back and listening to the goings-on, stuff about their kids, whose husband did what, what they're doing to their house and so forth.

These women were not model-types, nor were there any howlers. They ranged from average to pretty in the looks department.

In walks a woman, taller and thinner than most of the women I was with - wearing a very complimentary outfit. I wouldn't say it was a conservative outfit by any stretch of anyone's imagination, but it certainly wasn't anything trashy.

But you should have heard the change in tone amongst those I was with.

Viscious.

Brutal.

Heinous.

A small sample of what they said:
"What a whore!", "Oh - look at that slut!", "What, she couldn't afford more material for her skirt?", "What a skanky #####!", "Tramp", "Hussy", "Trash".

Whoa.

Now, let's say I'm with some guys in the same place I was with the women, and this Brad Pitt looking stud-boy with spandex pants on, looking like he's smuggling a cantaloupe walks in. He'd receive the same reaction as if a Bill Gates-type only nerdier walked in, which is: a quick glance and an unvoiced assessment about whether we could 'take him' or not, then back to the conversation.


Now, being a man, I've spent a lot of time hanging around other men, and I can reasonably guess what's going through their heads most of the time - since I'm sure the same thing is going through my own mind. Now, if I had gone into a restaraunt with my guy friends (back when I was a single man, of course), the pack of women that I was with, would have received appreciative glances. And some talk would have gone around the table about who would "do" who - which one was the wildest, and so forth. (Yeah, we're all pigs.)



Anyway, my point is that I don't think that it's society that puts all this pressure on women to look like waifs - it's women who put this pressure on themselves.


'Sides, men are bombarded constantly with images of atheletes and other successful men in the media all the time, just like women are bombarded with models and waifs.

The difference is that women seem to sink into a depression or lose self-esteem when they look at these people : Men give each other high fives when our stud-boys tackle the ever loving crap out of the opposing stud-boys.


---------------------

Now, as for weight: There is a real easy formula on losing weight. I know it's hard to stick to, but it's easy to learn:

Eat more calories than you use in a day - you gain weight.
Use more calories then you eat in a day - you lose weight.

That's it.


That's all there is to it.

Even if you're a barnacle stuck to your computer chair, and do nothing, you can determine how many calories a day you burn just by breathing and poking the keyboard, and adjust your food intake to match.

Carbs, protien, fat, fiber - all this stuff is neat for controlling the speed of your metabolism and other various things, but at the end of the day, you just need to spend more than you consume.

 

[pixiegirl]