Pardon my ignorance, but why does obesity/diabetes commonly lead to foot loss? And will doctors really amputate a person’s feet without their permission? Even if the feet had to come off or the person would die (and I currently have no understanding how this works), these are people who already decided to die young and happy, so why wouldn’t they just skip the amputation and allow themselves to die at that point?
Diabetes leads to poor circulation in the lower extremities, which leads to non-healing ulcers which often become gangrenous and threatens to turn the whole body septic, and has to be removed. I don’t believe that most people have it in them to just lay down and die- staying alive is a very strong biological imperative.
Ah, I see. Though if I was going to be concerned about losing a “lower extremity,” it wouldn’t be my feet.
Well, you’re less likely to have a cut or other injury in that other lower extremity, so gangrene is much less likely to set in.
I totally get where monstro’s coming from - I’m dealing with the same thing in my mother. It’s just so hard to tell someone who has been through so much shit in their life to take away something that makes them happy. Kind of like how we got Dad into the recovering alcoholic stage, and he does need to quit smoking, but that big one-two punch of losing your top two addictive vices is fucking hard.
Impotence is also a common result of the vascular complications of poorly controlled diabetes as well. Female sexual dysfunction as well.
I don’t want to argue about it either, but I don’t think I’m wrong about what untreated diabetes does to you. Does it always lead to limb amputation? Of course not. But my mother already has jacked-up feet due to years of wearing high heels and suffering through rheumatoid and osteoarthritis. So if she lets her diabetes go untreated all for the love of fried calamari and Krispy Kreme donuts, then limb amputation doesn’t seem so unfathomable. Especially if she has a “devil may care” attitude about her life and a sense of dreamy entitlement that her family will just care for her no matter what she does. And she’s right.
As far as ignoring societal expectations, I usually don’t care about them, but I am a sucker for familial ones. I wouldn’t be able to ignore my ailing parents, sorry. I wouldn’t be able to just throw up my hands and walk away…even if I believed their problems were self-induced. I don’t know if you have kids, but would you want them to just abandon you? Even if they came back at you with rational arguments about personal responsibility, it would still kill you inside, right? And if I got ill, I wouldn’t want someone to draw up a list of causative factors (not eating enough vegetables, not getting the right physical exams on the right schedule, living in the city instead of in the pollution-free country, taking medication that has side-effects, etc.) and using those things against me when it came to providing assistance.
All I’m saying is that no one is an island. Even if one has no friends or family, someone still has to take care of that person if they are unable to. So it just seems like being in as good of shape as one can reasonably be in is simply being considerate…of themselves and other people. Being ten, twenty, or thirty pounds overweight is not being irresponsible and is probably healthier (all other things being equal) than being underweight by the same proportions. But being seventy, eighty, or one hundred pounds simply isn’t. It doesn’t matter if a person doesn’t care. Someone else ultimately has to.
Now this I agree with this. It’s not an either/or thing.
Right, but that’s untreated diabetes. I’m saying you can have well-treated diabetes even if you are fat.
And I shouldn’t really address the parental issues because right now I’m having a severe falling-out with my mom that I’m not sure we’re going to recover from, so that’s probably influencing my feelings on this topic.
This is all pretty hijack-y, so sorry about that.
When I was growing up sometimes we didn’t eat. In later years (young adult) there were a couple periods where the only way we all got enough was because I used a kind of mental scale to gauge what we all needed to survive.
If, in my older years, I sometimes indulge in pizza or prefer (homemade) BLTs over broiled chicken breasts, don’t be a hater.
I’m feeding my inner child.
This “Don’t be a hater” stuff I just don’t understand. Are the only choices available total and unquestioning support or hate? Is there any room for something called “concern”, or does the scale only include points “all” and “nothing”?
Good point. Alas, “concern” is kinda, I dunno, silly because:
I think my main point, as badly made as it was in the OP, is that us fatties are apathetic oftentimes, not ignorant so saying “you know it’s easy to lose weight if you XYZ” is useless and just irritating. Tell me I need to lose weight if you feel concerned about me, but please don’t imagine I’ve not heard it before nor that I don’t realise I’m fat/unhealthy/useless etc.
I didn’t care. I was fat–quite fat, out-of-control fat–and other than the vague sense that I shouldn’t be, and a sort of general wish that it’d just magically get fixed, I didn’t really care all that much.
Then I had a scare. An eye condition that, before it was diagnosed, I was convinced was caused by the diabetes I was convinced I’d given myself. As it turns out, the eye condition was something else entirely, and I don’t have diabetes. I’m not even pre-diabetic.
Doesn’t matter. Enough was enough, and I had to do something–anything–to fix it. I started six and a half months ago, and I’ve lost about 75 pounds. I still have more to go, but I’m doing it.
That being said, sometimes people make that choice, and. . .maybe it is a little selfish, but so are a lot of things. I don’t think robbing yourself of something is selfish, though. The effect it has on others might make it so, but, fuck, if I decided that an unrestricted diet was more important to me than a long life, that’s my cost-benefit analysis.
The only time it really bugs me is when people are overweight, are unhappy about it, constantly bitch about it, and never actually try to make it better. They just want to talk about it. Constantly. Fortunately, the only people I’ve ever known who fit that are some female coworkers that I had ages ago, but man, did it drive me freaking batshit. I wouldn’t have been nearly so bothered if they made any sort of effort, even if that effort didn’t work, but nope. Just bitching.
Ok, I nominate this post as “Dumbest of the Month”. :smack:
Originally Posted by Omar Little
I’ve gained weight and I’ve lost weight. Losing weight takes the same amount of effort it took to gain it. It’s a choice. Some choices are harder than others though, as evidenced by many testimonies in this thread.
So you are contradicting yourself within your own post. If the choice of eating the foods that taste good and are enjoyable which lead a person to gain weight is easy and the choice of doing the things necessary to lose that weight once it’s been gained is hard; isn’t that different amounts of effort put forth in making those choices reality?
to say the least
It’s not stupid at all. People bemoan about how as little as 100 calories a day makes them fat, and how it’s a huge feat to cut out or burn the same amount. It’s not. Say your unhappy with their weight person weighs 250 pounds. At their weight if they take an 11 minute 4mph walk, they’ve burned 100 calories. Don’t tell me they can’t walk that fast, that’s my normal speed and I’ve walked with many people that size who have no problem keeping up with me.
Sure, it’s a few minutes quicker to eat that 100 calorie snack, but 11 minutes isn’t a grueling workout to burn it off. Walking is just one example, there are dozens of ways to spend that 11 minutes that’ll burn about 100 calories up from gardening and stacking firewood, to playing with their kids or using a snow blower. This of course scales up too: the average candy bar is gone in just over 20 minutes of activity.
You yourself here seem to be agreeing that there is not an equal amount of effort put forth between the two (gaining, losing weight). The poster that I was commenting on was saying this.
You seem to be disproving your own point here. Does it take you 20 minutes of moderate effort to eat a candy bar?
Well anyone who tells someone who is fat that “it’s easy to lose weight if you XYZ” is pretty damn ignorant. And sure there are plenty of those folk around, including on these boards, people who then take it farther and continue from that false belief to the belief that therefore anyone who is fat is a lazy glutton. Of course your op, taken at face value, demonstrates that some few indeed are. I don’t know you, so I don’t know if the face value is true for you or not, or a whoosh, but if not a whoosh, I’d wonder if it is a defense mechanism of sorts, sort of like the old Phil Collins “I Don’t Care Anymore.”
To beat the point into the ground however, the choices are not all or nothing; one can do a great deal to improve one’s health and quality of life without becoming thin, even staying well into the overweight or even obese range, and while still enjoying food. There is a big difference between not caring anymore about what others say, and not caring about your own health.
If you stop and savor every molecule, yeah.
I believe some percentage of the overweight population is like this to a certain extent.
But it seems to me that excess weight due to a build up of small indulgences over time should be relatively easy to lose and keep off, right? Just ratchet back the desserts and 2nd helpings and exercise a little. Stay aware of what you’re eating and don’t snack blindly. Doesn’t seem like a Herculean feat to me, and yet we’re hearing about people “giving up” as though not having an extra 100 calories everyday is too much to ask. This doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
“I am savoring the HELL out of this candy bar.”