So do I. He has a very distinct way of speaking with an unnatural cadence. And he repeats the same lines to every patient so there is a solid base of material to draw from.
There is exactly one person on earth who enjoys my impression.
This is beautiful.
mmm
I thought that rapid weight loss was a health hazard, too.
Rapid weight loss is a hazard, but for these people, not-rapid-enough weight loss is a bigger hazard. They’re in a tough spot.
I’m surprised that surgically removing adipose tissue isn’t more common.
I googled “surgery risks for obese patients”, and there’s a lot of them. As risky as rapid weight loss may be, it’s apparently less risky than surgery for these folks.
I dunno, I’m reading about that right now, and some of the risks are associated with the presence of the fatty tissue while healing, and others are similar to the risks of rapid weight loss. And… There are major risks replacing a heart valve, but we do it.
It possible that it’s really hard to remove enough adipose tissue to matter because it’s so disperse and interconnected with other stuff. But i suspect it’s at least partly because we see obesity as a moral failing, and patients should be punished with starvation, rather than helped with expensive treatments.
You aren’t the only one. I’ve often wondered about this re: hoarders as well. Food is expensive. Stuff is expensive.
Some of my college friends visited recently. And Mr friend has gotten really obese. So much so that Mrs friend had to give him a hand to get out of a chair, and he chose our couch rather than a large recliner for great of getting stuck. It was also hard to get him in and out of a car.
I had offered them food. (Them being this couple plus three other people.) And everyone said no thank you, because we’d just been at an event with food, and even though a few said they’d eaten lightly because they were coming to my place, in fact, no one was hungry. (I had invited them and promised the food before realizing we’d be fed at the prior event.) Except the fat guy. So i gave him a bagel with lox.
And i thought, “am i enabling his damaging obesity?” And i guess the answer is that yes, i was. It was all very awkward. But you know, food is part of hospitality, and I’d promised bagels and lox before knowing about the other meal, and also, before knowing how fat my friend had gotten. And he’s an adult and a doctor. (Pathology) It’s not as if he doesn’t know the issues.
Anyway, maybe next time i invite them over it will be for something that doesn’t involve food. But it’s awfully easy to see how other people keep providing food to people they love.
I would not call that enabling. He is mobile and can obviously go places. If he wants food he can get food. You wouldn’t be an enabler unless you are the only way for him to get food and you bring him thousands and thousands of calories all the time. One bagel and lox is hardly that.
Over the long term, any calorie reduction rate will work. But the more that you reduce, the more that the person will feel like there’s been a reduction, feel hunger, and feel like they need more.
A 0.27% reduction in calories, per day compounded, will get you down to 2000 calories in 5 years.
Dropping from 800lbs to 180, that’s 620lbs over 260 weeks, which would be more than 2lbs per week on average.
0.27% of 8000 calories is 21.6 calories or about the equivalent of 5 peanuts. Towards the end of the weight loss period - say, when you’re at 2100 calories per day - you would target a 5 calorie reduction. That’s the equivalent of a single peanut.
Big percentage cuts are not necessary and only make you hungry enough to quit the diet. When you need to cut 620 lbs, we’re not talking about something that you can pull off in a few months. Slow and easy is the game. If you do it slow enough, you won’t even know that it’s happening, except by charting it.
Judging from the show, Slow is challenging to do. When you are super morbidly obese, the one kindness that the universe gives you is the ability to pull off startlingly big amounts of weight amazingly fast. If only that kind of rapid weight loss was easier for people who weren’t so fat…