I have a friend. He came over on Wednesday to watch the first game of the World Series (he has no cable). I offered him some desert. No, this was one of his 600 calorie days. He explained that two days a week, he is limited to 600 calories (soup only) and eats regularly the other 5. He is 5’7" and weighs just over 150 lb, but his wife insists he is too heavy and has put him on this diet.
The wife is 5’4" and weighs under 80lb. As you can imagine, she looks like someone out of a concentration camp. She maintains that she cannot eat more; food nauseates her. But she has been examined extensively and no cause for the nausea has been found and she is in ill-health, possibly losing heart muscle. She is 75.
Her older sister lives with them and one day, my friend said to me that he couldn’t understand why his wife is so ill and his SIL (in her 80s) is so healthy. I said something like luck of the draw, but asked him why he said that and his answer: “Because C (the SIL) is so fat”! Now I see C from time-to-time and no one could possibly describe her as fat. Not skinny, possibly slightly overweight (although I would guess not), but fat? No way.
Frankly, I think the wife is anorexic, obsessed by weight, and has put my perfectly normal weight husband on this grim diet and believes her sister to be fat because of some reality distortion field concerning weight. Any thoughts?
I decide exactly how many calories my dogs eat each day because they aren’t capable of doing it on their own. Your friend is being a good boy! He wasn’t embarrassed to admit this?
I don’t know what is wrong with your friend’s wife, if it is a mental health issue or some undiagnosed medical issue, or just that she has the genes that say 70’s is as far as it goes, but clearly it is not good.
What I can offer is that a slightly higher BMI is associated with decreased mortality in the elderly.
All the cautions regarding interpreting BMI data of course apply but “slightly overweight” is associated with longer life expectancy in those 75 and over.
I don’t know if it’s an eating disorder or not, but 5’4" and 80 pounds is painfully thin. My mother had a cancerous tumor removed from her abdomen a couple years ago, followed by chemotherapy, and she has never been a large person in her life. She got down to 5’3" and 103 pounds, and was scarily, horribly thin. Like I was afraid she’d break when I hugged her. I can’t imagine what 80 pounds would be.
For the record, after going through that, I’ve really come around to the camp of thinking having a few extra pounds on you (not tons, just a few) especially if you’re older is a good thing. I think things would have been a lot easier for my Mom if she’d started out weighing another 10 or 15 pounds (her normal weight is around 118, and even that seems pretty thin on her). You never know what’s going to happen; a few extra pounds in reserve seems like a good idea.
I’m only 5’2’’ and after a bout of depression weighed in at 103 lbs. My friends and family were seriously worried saying I looked scary thin. I still think that’s an exageration but I was a size 2. A size 2 is tiny. 80 lbs. is very scary. Your MIL is definately out of the normal range - way out of the normal range. This women has too much control over her husband and sister - she sounds toxic.
I’ve heard that somewhere along the way, too - that a couple of extra pounds is actually healthier for older ladies. I know my mom is around 5’4" and (I think) around 140 pounds - at 71, she’s healthy as a horse and exercises daily (I go for walks with her when she’s here, and she can hold her own with people 30 years younger!).
I agree with the others; I think the lady in question has an eating disorder or body dysmorphic disorder, or something, and unfortunately, her disorder seems to be contagious. I looked up some pictures of 5’7" 150 pound guys, and that sounds like an ideal weight - not overweight at all.
The 600 calorie days don’t seem like a good idea, either - that’s into starvation levels of eating, and although there is a LOT of disagreement in the dieting world, I think most people agree that starving yourself puts your body into conserving calories mode.
I also think that the reason she can’t eat any more and gets nauseated is because of her anorexia - she’s in a positive feedback loop, where she can’t eat more because she doesn’t eat, and she doesn’t eat more because she can’t eat.
So I just looked it up, cause was curious - Jesus - even if she was 105 pounds - at that height she’d still be in the under 2 percentile for weight. She’s 25 pounds lighter than what puts you in the lowest category that nhanes has. A 13.7 BMI. Lots of times people say - oh - he/she’s not fat, but they are naive and yes they are.
This is obviously not one of those times.
I doubt she will see the light - but he still has a chance.
This site is pretty good with letting you look up percentile and stuff:
Yes - you can argue that is based on Americans - who are fatter on average, but there are still plenty of thin people here - and if you look at the thinnest 2% - she is 25 pounds less than that. Sad thing is - she probably thinks that is great.
At first I was going to dismiss this post as being glib, but actually, I think there’s a point here.
I mean, I’m 5’7’’ and underweight. Probably 150lbs would make me look a bit on the heavy side, but lots of guys are sturdier than I am.
But really. His wife “put him on a diet”? And he’ll happily accept dietary advice/instructions from a woman who weighs 80lbs? I don’t know that he has an eating disorder, but he may wish to rethink his approach to this situation.
Maybe it’s a situation where he’s heard the same thing from his wife so long that he doesn’t question it any longer - that anyone with any flesh on their bones is fat. I think Hari might gently give him a different perspective - that he’s fine and his wife is the one who is too skinny, but I don’t know how far that would go to counteract the input from his disordered wife.
The diet she is suggesting is the 5:2 diet, all the rage in Britain and Australia at the moment Intermittent fasting - Wikipedia but it certainly sounds unnecessary, any chance you could get him to consult his Dr about the wisdom or necessity of this?
Just for the record, I have told him repeatedly that his weight is fine, but she has convinced him he is too heavy. As for her, she admits she admits she should gain some weight (she used to weigh about 100 lb, but lost 7 in the throes of some acute stomach upset and has gone downhill from there), but cannot because of the nausea. I would have accepted this but for the diet she put her husband on and the comment he made about her sister, which makes me think that they both have a distorted body image.
Incidentally, I have told him that people our age seem to do a little better being a bit overweight, but he simply doesn’t believe me. Actually, I find it hard to believe too. Correlation doesn’t imply causation and maybe so many seventy and eighty year olds are wasting away that the statistics are skewed.
Yes, she is anorexic. Anorexics fight tooth and nail to convince themselves *and *everyone around them (the two go hand in hand) that an unhealthy low weight is still too fat.
From here:
A little off-topic, but there seem to be a lot of knowledgeable folks here. How does an anorexic reconcile their actual weight (i.e. an objective measure, rather than something subjective like looking in the mirror) with things like BMI which classify them as Severely Underweight?
Because “they look fat.” Their thigs look big. Their stomach looks big. I decided to diet until my legs got skinny. I was 5’5 1/2" tall and weighed 85 lbs, but my legs were thin.
Portia diRossi’s book “Unbearable Lightness” is a good read of how she conquered anorexia by following a normal person’s eating habits and stopping compulsive exercising.
So my question is how you reconcile “how you think you look” with “the subjective measure of the scale”.
So whilst you feel one way (overweight) , a subjective measure is telling you something else (underweight).
So do you honestly believe that at 85 pounds you are overweight, i.e. either accepted medical opinion is wrong, or you are the exception to the rule? Or is it that you know you are underweight from a theoretical point of view, but still see yourself as fat and the view of fatness (a beauty measure) is more important to you than the measure of underweight (a health measure)?
Yes, you still see yourself as fat because “My legs look big.” Since most people are built to certain perporations, their “fat” parts will look fat no matter how much weight they lose.
The first three months of not dieting were hell for me. I’d realize I was hungry and want to eat. But what? I didn’t even know what I liked to eat. All I knew was calories.
For diRossi it was her stomach. No matter how much weight she lost, her stomach looked “fat.”