As someone who has become almost a hundred pounds overweight, and had little success at losing it, I’ve considered some radical proposals for weight loss. Of course I’ve considered Baryatric surgery (and if I cannot lose weight by the time I graduate nursing school may pursue that option). However, I think these theoretical options could be as or more effective, and would certainly not be that much more radical from a surgery, intervention standpoint:
I. Have the feeding centers around my hypothalamus ABLATED. I remember reading in one of my Physiology books that rats which had the “feeding centers” located around their (I think it could have been lateral of the Hypothalamus, but it’s been a year so I could be remembering incorrectly) lateral hypothalamuses ablated DIED of malnutrition, when they COMPLETELY stopped eatting. I figure that unlike a rat, I could will myself to eat SOMETHING even if I felt NO hunger.
II. Have my olefactory nerve severed. No olefactory nerve no smell. No smell= No taste. No taste likely = eating less. Of course using this approach I would have had myself castrated as a teenager to avoid hair loss (of course that approach would have had the added bonus of eliminating prostate cancer risk especially if they went ahead and also removed the prostrate.)
III. Okay, here’s another radical approach. I once read a great book years ago by Stephen Newman called WorldWalk. This guy in the early 1980’s decided to literally walk around the world starting in Ohio and heading East. He also decided to try and NEVER pay for lodging (he had to make a few exceptions here and there). Thus, he mainly camped out, and stayed with kind hearted strangers (even in FRANCE!). In addition, he wrote a weekly column for his hometown newspaper (he had graduated with a degree in journalism I think). Thus, my plan would be to duplicate his efforts avoiding the more dangerous parts of the world. I would literally keep walking until I lost the desired amount of weight!
Anything extreme that doesn’t involve surgery is quite likely to be a flash in the pan; I like the world walk idea, but do you think you can really do it.
Why not do a ‘virtual’ World Walk? - plan a few local walks and measure their distance exactly, then walk one or more of them every day, counting the miles and working out where you would have been if you’d kept going in a (more or less) straight line.
Some of your ideas are based on practical approaches to weight loss: exercise, eat less…control hunger.
You have control fo the exercise piece. You can do that now - no one needs to snip or block anything surgically. Exercise does help, but most of the weight loss equation comes down to caloric intake. For example, if you binge on Burker King one day, you might have jacked up your caloric intake by 2,000 calories. To just offset these calories, you are dealing with hours and hours of exercise…maybe half a marathon. Really! And in this case, the exercise wents towards wait maintenance, not loss!
How can you control your appetite better? A nutritionist might help. There are ways to eat which can help control hunger. Not shut it down, but help you manage it.
Starving to kill a gland or killing the feeding ceners ? Hmmm…the rats died…and anorexics sometimes die, even when they know they must eat to live!
I like your first idea, but if effective, I think you would run a very real risk of starving yourself to death. Can the ‘procedure’ be reversed?
I have a friend who has absolutely no sense of smell, and she has a weight problem! One day, I had to ask her about it, and she said that she still has the sense of tasting salty things and really sour things, and that she has become addicted to the sensations of tasting either of these ‘flavors’. Apparently, one adapts to one’s limitatations, and the thrill may be lesser, but it is still there.
I happen to consider the Atkins thing a little nutty, but your proposals make it look like a very sensible option; yes, they are bordering on the insane, I think.
On the way home from work today, I wondered if, with the World Walk thing, you aren’t subconsciously setting yourself up for failure; Ive seen people do this before; repeatedly trying to tackle a problem by means of a solution that is so grandiose and grossly out of proportion to the problem itself that it quickly falls apart. Patting themself on the back for giving it their very best shot, they continue to live with the problem, until the next iteration.
Seriously, the way to lose weight is to consume less calories than your body requires to maintain a constant weight; it doesn’t mean you have to go about with a constant gnawing hunger (you just fill yourself up with stuff that isn’t energy-dense) and it doesn’t even mean that you can’t occasionally splash out (although you might have to ‘pay’ for the extra food with a bit more exercise).
Have a look at this site - enter your details and it will tell you how many calories per day it will take to maintain your current weight; aim to undercut this by a few hundred and you WILL lose weight (but you have to be honest about the calorie counting).
I have to second Mangetout’s point. If you can’t control what goes into you, chopping bits off you or some other extreme solution is unlikely to help.
For example, from a Discovery Channel program. Woman is obese. Woman gets stomach stapled. Woman is still obese because she eats lots of small portions of “bad” food often.
So, point by point:
Don’t be ridiculous. You want someone cutting into your brain?
More sensible. Still, cutting out a part (AFAIK, smell does not = taste, but I may be wrong) of your enjoyment of the food is not necessarily going to reduce your calorie intake. Save the money, time, pain and mutilation and just never buy fast food/take away again (or at least until you hit a weight that you’re happy with).
If you have the will to take off and wonder around the world, you probably have the will to reduce calorie intake and do some basic exercise (even weekend walks). If not, then you’ve packed in your job for nothing.
As a prelude to doing anything, write down everything that you consume (solid and liquid) in a typical week. Post it here (or find a calorie chart) along with your vital statistics (no, not that sort, the height/age/exercise level ones ). Don’t undereat in that week and don’t lie. Someone will easily be able to show you where you’re going wrong.
it IS something that I’ve always wanted to do ever sense reading Newman’s book. I think that there could be a market for a REPEAT of the walk. However, in the political climate today, I’m not sure I (or anyone else) would survive the trip.
It seems to me like these proposals all center around somehow forcing yourself to either eat less or exercise. Were I in this situation, I would try other drastic methods of controlling my actions first BEFORE I cut up my brain/nerves or decided to travel on foot around the world.
For example, you could:
Take all the food out of your house. Then go shopping with a friend or family member who would allow you to purchase ONLY enough food to last until the next shopping trip. Then lock up your cash and credit cards until the next trip.
Hire a large Austrian man to yell at you regularly and tell you to exercise.
Get rid of your car, if you have one, or lock up the keys. Get a bike. Ride it everywhere.
Get rid of or make temporarily unusable the majority of your furniture. Keep your bed and an uncomfortable chair. Sedentary pursuits are less attractive if you can’t be comfortable while doing them.
Get rid of your tv. Call your ISP and cancel your service and remove all games from your computer. Donate your books to the local library. If there’s anything else that you often do while sitting, prevent yourself from doing it.
These are drastic measures and are not required in order to lose weight, even a lot of weight. But they are all still a LOT less drastic than, say, permanently removing one of your senses and permanently damaging another.
or actually in class. I post here “on breaks” during the wee hours of the night. Any “extra” time that I might have is spent with my wife and son. In fact the only time we see each other is during our (usually) late night meal, often the ONLY meal I get to eat all day. Also, here in rural Indiana, living on a narrow frontage road beside the Interstate where people routinely drive 70, biking is not much of an option. This is part of the reason we seek to move to Oahu. It’s warm, and you can be outside pretty much year round.
Perhaps this could be part of the problem. One of the only things you seem to hear consistently from diet gurus is “Don’t skip meals!” as it makes your body behave as if food is more scarce than it really is.
You will just get annoyed, feel like shit, and it wont actually do anything! Your body will go into starvation mode, and not burn as much as it used to, so you’ll be back to square one.
Best way is to see a metabolism expert, have you checked out. He can allocate a good diet for you, one that works the maximise your natural burning.
Then get out there and walk a lot. Walk for fun, dont worry about the results; you’ll actually find walking will fix other stuff like stress and even respitory problems like random coughing.
As elfbabe says, this is probably a large chunk of your problem. My brother-in-law is a crazy workaholic type who eats his only meal when he get’s home at night. A large one. He’s about 50 pounds overweight.
No cite for you though. Still, eat breakfast (cereal, not fry up) and make yourself sandwiches for lunch. Cut down your evening meal calories (basically, stop frying things and don’t add butter). Get used to diet sodas (after a while you’ll prefer diet coke to the real thing).
I remember way back when, when people had their jaws wired shut, preventing the intake of solid food. The wires were removed after the desired weight level was achieved. I dont know if they still do this.
I would be very wary of any stomach or intestinal bypass, the long term effects, esp in old age, are unknown. My hospital will only do it if you are so overweight that you will likely die(soon) anyways.
Seriously, the only healthy(responsible) way to lose weight is by eating less, eating nutritious foods, and exercising more.
You might want to think back as to why you origianlly wanted to become a nurse, and then apply it to yourself.
"Unfortunately, I’m in nursing school and spend about 100 hours a week either studying "
Get a treadmill and an exercise bike- you can study while exercising, that is what I did. 100 hours of treadmill/cycling a week will make you fit. Take a nutrition class at your nursing school.
IMO even commonplace surgeries for weight loss are crazy. Your ideas apart from doing a lot of walking are looney bin certifiable. Please consider something aside from mutilating vital organs to lose weight. I’m atgainst stomach surgery personally but several friends have done well with and the lap band seems the safest and least invasive/damaging.
I will not be an Atkins missionary but there is something to it. I’ve made a modest effort, not completely reducing carbs but I have cut out high glycemic index carbs and sugar and it has made a dramatic difference. My appetite has been reduced and I’ve lost 12lb in the past two weeks.
I have had to be brutal about cutting out sugar and have made a good effort to reduce other white starchy carbs like white flour and potatoes. I still eat low carb bread and tortillas but limit intake and we still have a pizza or mashed potatoes once in a while. It wasn’t easy as I have a real sweet tooth but after a few weeks it has really reduced my cravings. Had a slice of cake at a friend’s house and the frosting tasted almost too sweet to eat to me.
Don’t use low carbs as an excuse to fill yourself with saturated fat. Lots of folks use Atkins as an excuse to have bacon with mayo on it ten times aday but that’s not good either. I’m not afraid of meat or eggs but I try to keep up the intake of green vegtables. Just had blood work done and my LDL cholesterol is a tad high but HDL is above where it should be, triglycerides are low and blood sugar is okay. Doc has said to increase excercise and come back in six qeeks for more blood work. She has also suggested I look into the south beach diet and is emphasizing cutting high glycemic index carbs.
classes while in school. In addition, when I was in the Navy, I was in EOD and are training was ALMOST as hard as that of SEALS. At some point in my mid twenties I lost the ability to run due to a right ankle injury (the Navy Doc said it was because my Years of running on my flat feet had inflicted injuries that were likely permanent). I can walk fine, but can’t run for more than about 100 feet without virtually falling down. It has been since I stopped running and working out (out one time I worked out about two hours EVERYDAY on top of my required Navy/EOD training exercise) that I’ve gained my weight. In addition, as a teenager I was a big Pritikin/Ornish/Dr. Robert Haus advocate in my nutrition. Unfoturnately, in the past seven years (I’m now 35) my eating has been more like the “Dr Frankenstine” diet, with very little exercise (when we did the mortgage/appraisal business we actually worked MORE than now, usually seven days a week 12 to 16 hours per day). Of course what’s the point in spending years in nursing school to become a CRNA or NP only to die of a heart attack at 45?
If you had Nutrition then you should know that if you eat more Kcalories than you burn, you will get fat. If you eat less, you will lose fat. Pretty simple really. If you cannot “run”, then eat less.
What are you going to tell your patients who are overweight?
If you can’t run, but still are able to ride a bike or do other low-impact stuff, I’d recommend an elliptical running machine. It replicates running without the impact. That’s my favorite cardio machine of all. You can get a really hard workout on it without hurting a weak ankle, and burn beaucoup calories in a short amount of time.
I agree with a lot of the posters: weight loss is a mathematical formula in which you burn more calories than you take in. And FWIW, I’ve found that no matter what my diet, if I don’t exercise several times a week, I don’t lose or even :eek: slowly gain weight. And if I exercise regurlarly, but eat too much junk food, the same result occurs. For me at least, it takes both.
I was born without a sense of smell (anosmia?) and my taste is just fine, it’s probably better than most people’s. The body compensates for a missing “sense”
). Don’t undereat in that week and don’t lie. Someone will easily be able to show you where you’re going wrong.