Yes. I had to go down to about 500 or less to lose weight and 750 calories a day merely maintained my weight. I did pass out, have headaches, constant nausea, lightheadedness and I was always cold. I did eventually end up in the emergency room.
I was 5 foot tall and wieghed 135 pounds when I was taken to the emergency room.
Well, wait: I know that in ‘starvation’ mode, the body basically tries to hold on to everything that does get fed into it. But if someone is already well overweight, what I am asking is if the body won’t simply look around for excess fat etc. to burn off if new food intake is cut back.
I am more used to kilograms and centimeters but 5 feet and 135lbs doesn’t really sound that fat to me. What weight were you when you started on that drastic diet? Had you been 235lbs, would you still a) not have lost weight and b) still ended up in the hospital?
If it helps you, I’m 5’10" and 155.
As for the whole “starvation” idea . . . how do you reconcile that with the extreme weight of so many anorexic people?
Stoidela – she eats a 20/30/50 diet of fat, protein, carbohydrates. It’s the most nutritionally sound diet she can have at this time. She/me/her doctors are hoping that the walking will kick her sluggish metabolism back into normal action. But she’s been “dieting” since she was 7. She is now almost 40. The exercise approach will take YEARS even with the calorie restrictions.
We are talking about overcoming a lifetime of starvation diets by keeping her on another one until we can get her metabolism in gear. It’s fucking HELL for her. She’s doing her best but warping anything; fat/carb/prot isn’t going to help when it’s really the damn overall calories. Yeah, she could do the high protein diet thing but she’d just loose water and no/lo carb does the same thing.
It’s fucking hell. This is the best thing for her at this moment. Calorie restriction and upping her metabolism through exercise. I’m really glad at least one other person gets where she is at… it’s so much hell for her. I have my own issues but NOTHING like what she’s going through. I can very easily maintain my weight on 2000 calories a day… if you don’t think I bow down and thank the Goddess everyday for that you’ve pegged me wrong! 
I have to run, lift weights but I can still eat almost like a normal person and I’m glad. I really do thank the Goddess everyday that my anorexia didn’t screw me up more. I’m so damn lucky. Really, I am.
I just really wish folks would stop yelling shit at her when she does walk to help her metabolism. I’m sorry but that really sticks in my craw. I run everyday and no one says shit to me (I’m a bit overweight but not like her) but why on EARTH are they DOING that to her?! She’s trying so hard and every fucking day she gets shit, rude comments, mooing and my Goddess but it just breaks my heart as to WHY?! WHY are people DOING that to her? WHY? She’s not doing anything but walking down the fucking road… why harangue her? WHY?! I just don’t understand… it makes me so mad but it makes me cry too. I go with her sometimes and even with me there people yell, and moo and all kinds of shit… I’d of shriveled up and died long ago but this lady… shit. She IS a lady. She’s got this crystal of fortitude or something… she has a rock… she has something because I know it would have fucking killed ME long ago. I admire her. I LOVE her. She’s got bigger balls than any man I know…
webmastr – stomach stapling is a horrible, final solution. I think of Hitler and his final solution. In order to make this work what they do is basically take the stomach, pinch it off so that it only holds about 1 cup of food and then that food falls basically unprocessed into the large intestine. (Someone please point out if I have this wrong). That’s my basic understanding of the operation itself. However, after the operation, the surgeon has never addressed the “overeating” factor and if, after this, you overeat, you can pop the staples, and cause peritonitis or worse… it’s not a viable solution. It’s a last ditch effort… it never really addresses the underlying issues and for someone like Lisa, who has already restricted her food intake, it won’t work. She really can’t restrict her food intake anymore than she has… I really, in my heart, think it’s mutilation. It causes more problems than it solves. Surely, there is someone on this board that has had this done, had a loved one who had it done, who could provide better insight than I.
But I am encouraged by your interest. That to me says you WANT to be educated. You don’t want to hate; you want to understand. For that, I’m glad. Fuck it, I’m THRILLED! Education is the very BEST way to overcome bias… thank you so much for listening, reading and really understanding.
It’s not about “feeling sorry” it’s about being educated and understanding. And yes, I and anyone with any kind of education in nutrition or obesity problems will tell you: it IS entirely possible for someone who has consistently dieted on 1000 calories or less, for a great percentage of their life, to gain weight on less than 1000 calories a day.
Let me explain it thus. You start out, a normal kid, but you/your parents/or someone freaks out that you are “getting too big” and they start restricting your overall calorie intake. What does your body do? It learns how to get by on less. This goes on and on until you are about 18 or so… by this point your body has “learned” that you will only give it 1000 calories a day… and then let’s say you start to eat 1200 or 1500… minimal by most standards, but your body has been trained on 1000 a day… your body, trained for YEARS to starvation, grabs up everything past 1000 calories and logs it for fat; why? Because your body is in constant starvation mode…
Do you get it now? Do you? I hope so. If most of these folks would have been left alone their bodies would have stabilized maybe bigger than “normal” but not super sized. Through the constant state of starvation dieting they have bodies “trained” to grab every calorie and push it to fat… because their body KNOWS they are in constant starvation mode.
Dear Goddess, please, PLEASE don’t make more folks think that this is okay. It’s just not NORMAL for any human body to live on 1000 calories a day… turn your hate to understanding and don’t push the “starvation dieting” any further.
Thank you.
Byz: 5’9" and 200# doesn’t sound fat to me.
Webstinker: I suppose you won’t be posting your Brad Pitt lookalike body for us to see will you?
Maybe if you gained a lot of weight, you would understand and see it from the “other” side.
I wasn’t popular in school, and most of the girls who were friendly to me were overweight. I wonder why. Maybe casue they had been deemed not-good-enough and then developed compassiona nd character from this. Maybe you should gain some weight, it might help your personality.
When desperation strikes, we do stupid damn things. Every woman on my mother’s side of the family is overweight. Hell, I’m being nice. We’re fat.
When I was a kid, my older cousin had her jaw wired shut so she could lose weight. I thought it was stupid then, now I think it was just nuts. Yeah, she lost weight. But she looked like hell. There was never any color in her cheeks, her hair started falling out because your body has to have a certain percentage of fat that she wasn’t getting, she had no energy, and she just looked unhealthy even if she was thin.
I starved myself in high school. I got away with it because no one realized I wasn’t eating. I didn’t get hom until after 10 every night because I worked after school. I’m 5’4 and weighed 180. Sure, I lost it. But I had the dizzy spells, the headaches, the shakes, couldn’t concentrate for shit, stomach pains that I just wrote off as my stomach shrinking. Got down from a size 18 to a 14. Not that it did me any good in a hospital bed after I passed out during band practice. My parents was horrified, my fiancee was furious and my doctor was ready to keep me in the hospital because of the damage I had done to my system. It was not pleasant.
My mother, bless her heart, hates doctors. So much so that between '79 and '90 she didn’t step foot in a doctor’s office for herself. She had gained ALOT of weight over the years. At 5’1" she was a little butterball and she knew it. She was subjected to the name calling whenever we went out to eat. I thought my Dad was going to punch somebody on more than one occassion but his glare was usually enough to stop the name callers and dirty looks. She tried on her own to lose it over the years, to get back to something close to the size 7 she had been after I was born, but it just wasn’t happening. If anything, she gained more. It wasn’t until she took a bad step off the porch and shattered her thigh bone that they discovered in the hospital that she was diabetic. Scared the crap out of us because untreated, that could have killed her so many times. We have no idea when it developed. As she brought her blood sugar under control, she lost weight, but not any significant amount. She turned to drastic measures. Her own doctor wouldn’t perform the stomach stapling. Flat out refused. When she just wouldn’t let it go he finally recommended one who would. She had to sign reams of paperwork and speak to a psychatrist whose job it was to make certain that she was doing this for valid health reasons and not just for looks (a part of the process I agree with, BTW and one that is part of the process mention in an earlier post). She had it done. She lost some weight. She was MISERABLE. UNHAPPY. We were supportive of her choice and her effort but we became unhappy as she did. She cried alot in front of us, which was so alien for her. They sent her back to the shrink. They eventually decided that her mental health was far more important that her dress size-thank the heavens-and went in again to remove the damned staples. It was still a few months before she was MOM again. She still weighs over 300, but her cholesterol is under control, her diabetes is under control, her blood pressure is under control and most importantly, she’a happy. That leg she messed up still gives her trouble and she’s doing good to walk the quarter mile that the trip to and from her mailbox constitutes so excerise isn’t a real option. Her grandkids would much rather get a hug from Granny Betty “'cause she’s soft” than their other grandmothers who are “pokey” and she does “Grandma things” like bake them cookies [don’t ask me where she finds low sugar, low fat cookie reciepes. She just does] while their other grandma won’t even allow cookies in the house because she’s always on a diet.
I’ve resigned myself to being a big girl. No, that’s wrong. I accept the fact that I am geneticly put together to be built like an ancient fertility goddess and wonder of wonders, there has never been a shortage of men in my life who loved me. It was my mental mindset over the years that made me go on one fad diet after another and put the extra poundage on my big boned frame after I stopped the madness. Because I don’t want to develop the diabetes that my mother has or that killed my grandmother, I watch what I eat and try to be careful of the sugars and fats, but I’m not stressing because I’m a size 20 and the chart at the doctor’s office says I should be a size 9, and I’m sure as hell not putting myself under the knife just so I can look good in Levis for strangers.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by webmastr *
**
Vocabulary lesson:
Sympathy: A feeling or an expression of pity or sorrow for the distress of another; compassion or commiseration.
Empathy: Identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives.
You have used empathy several times in this thread, and it is not possible for you to feel empathy with fat people.
stoid
The income guidelines for qualification for food stamps are ridicilously low. As tight as a buget is, if they’re only going to give you $20-$40.00 a month and you have to go redo the paperwork every 3 months-taking a day off from school or work 'cause DHS doesn’t take appointments-it really is more trouble than it’s worth for a lot of people. You just make do with what you have. People that DO qualify for the more generous amount, say $240.00 for a family of four, two of them children, you HAVE to buy enought to last a month and in my case when I was one of them, that meant buying carefully. The people buying prepackaged and frozen food probably run out before the month is up. Not smart either way.
Anyway, I don’t have to do a study. I know what it is to shop like that and feed a family like that and what it does to a diet. As someone said earlier, children NEED fat in their diets, more than adults. I can’t cook two sets of meals, one for me and another for everybody else on $240.00 a month. Even after we were off FS, the budget still didn’t allow for it, not while I’m still in school and have a whole $300.00 a month for food. Unless I want to go on that 2 years of nothing for me but carrots diet.
I have come to recognize over the years that there are some unexpected benefits to being fat. One of them is that it serves as a superb asshole-filter. If you are a fat woman who is relatively confident, with a decent level of self-esteem, you will find you attract really top-level men, men with depth, kindness, compassion.
I have two friends who qualify as not only beautiful, but absolutely stunning. Not just cheerleader-cute, but truly gorgeous women. Both of them have LOTS and LOTS of men who want to date them…and most of them are dicks. They always want to get my friends into bed, can’t shut up about their looks, and generally end up being shallow jerks. Both of my gorgeous friends are alone and neither has ever had a truly rewarding, loving, healthy relationship with a man. And both of them are marvelous women; bright, funny, accomplished, kind, enlightened…really terrific gals.
I, on the other hand, am engaged to the best man I have ever met. He is physically beautiful (lucky me!), kind, good, a fabulous lover, sweet and affectionate, smart as hell and he makes me laugh every day. I look around at my friends, and curiously, it is the very least attractive among them who have the very best relationships with the very best guys.
Hardly a scientific study, but I don’t think it’s jsut a coincidence, either.
When I was much slimmer, I worried about a man falling in love with me looking like that…what if I gained the weight back and he stopped loving me? I’m so grateful I found Pump Action Gerbil while looking the worst I’ve ever looked in my life (he tells me I’m beautiful and he loves me. And for the record, he is not a chubby chaser and he would certainly be pleased if I lost weight. It’s just that he loves me for me and sees my beauty and my sexiness no matter what size I am.)
there are other benefits, but I may open a thread to discuss it…
MC, if you don’t have time to spy on people in the grocery store, take a good look around the next time you’re in a food court, just for fun. No matter where you are in North America, I’ll wager that purchasing a cheeseburger, french fries and a Coke costs less than buying a spinach salad and a bottle of juice. (That’s if you’re lucky enough to find a salad that isn’t two or three days old and doesn’t taste like a dirty fridge.)
Eating healthy in a mall or on the highway generally costs more than eating easily-found junk food, in my experience.
tsk tsk Kels, you forgot about poofing too… neat, perfumed and poofed 
Healthy food doesn’t cost more than unhealthy food, especially if you cut back on meat consumption. However, healthy “convenience” food (low fat salad dressings, microwave meals, pre-cut vegetables, etc.) costs more than unhealthy convenience food.
::rolleyes::
I don’t buy microwave meals or precut anything. I’m 38 years old. I kniw how to shop and I know how to use a knife. I don’t know where you live, but here it does cost more. The lower the fat content in meat or cheese, the more it costs. If I cut back anymore on the meat consumption, we may as well be vegetarians. And no, that is not an option.
Um, duh?
This thread is interesting, and I think that we’re stamping out ignorance. However, it’s also getting to be too long, and it’s starting to get into Great Debates rather than the Pit. So I’m gonna close this thing down, and anyone who wants to can start a thread in GD.
Lynn