I’ve been following this thread for the past few days with a mixture of frustration and sadness. I’m sorry to stray a little from the OP, but–as Stoid pointed out–hundreds of people may be reading this, and I don’t want them to go away with the wrong impression. I know that Great Debates isn’t the best place for personal “testimony,” but I thought it might be appropriate in this case.
I own an ancient tape recording made on my last day of 4th grade. My friends all wish me a happy summer and a fun time at summer camp. Then Sarah comes on–the girl I’ve had a burning crush on all year. Apparently, she is holding a camera.
“I took pictures of everyone but you,” she says. “You wouldn’t fit in the frame.”
She laughs. I laugh.
For nearly two decades, I laughed at myself. My eyes would wet slightly and my face would feel flush, but I kept laughing. When friends or bullies taunted, I said my rehearsed comebacks. The taunting abated as I grew older, but the flush of shame remained.
I’ve read plenty of “popular” books on weight loss & control and picked up much conflicting information. Eat more protein–no, eat less protein! Banish junk food from your house–no, fill all your cupboards with junk food! Take this pill and lose weight in your sleep! Sweep fat out of the digestive system like a broom! Looking back on the “science” behind some of these schemes, it’s not surprising that I’d never managed to lose an ounce.
I seemed predestined for a life of flab. Everyone in my family is fat, in the 250-300 pound range. About five years ago, I looked in the mirror at my protruding belly and thought, “That’s it, that’s me forever–it’s in the genes, it’s in the metabolism, it’s in the luck,” and went on with my life. Popular books and articles claimed that my body had a “set weight” or “preferred weight” that it would try to maintain at all costs, and that it was actually healthier for me not to fight it. My doctor said I was otherwise “healthy,” whatever that meant, but I didn’t feel healthy. I felt tired, emotionally drained, depressed.
Then, a few years ago, I did something a little crazy. I started reading medical books & journals. I’m not talking about books by Oprah or Richard Simmons–I mean serious, 10-pound textbooks and journals printed in two columns of 9-point text, books by and for the people on the cutting edge of metabolism research. They were way over my head at the time, but I just skimmed over the stuff I didn’t understand and tried to get the main points.
What I found stopped me in my tracks. Much “popular” lore was wrong, dead wrong. Some of it was disproven decades ago. I don’t mean to sound evangelical, but what I found changed my life. It’s something that some people might not want to hear, but it has been demonstrated in studies and experiments again and again and again.
In a word, the body is a machine. It is not a blob of jelly. It is subject to the laws of physics just like your car engine or balls dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Learning about how this machine actually works was perhaps the most fascinating journey I’ve ever undertaken. The path that food follows as it gets broken down, stored, fetched, converted into useful energy–it’s incredibly complex yet breathtakingly beautiful.
And–in all but a small minority of persons–it functions like clockwork. Two people, given similar height, exercise habits, and diet will be approximately the same weight. Note that I said approximately. YES, there are variations from person to person, or even for a single person at different times. YES, there are diseases that cause some people to get fat despite low-cal diets. YES, I know I’m simplifying. But only a tiny slice of people with metabolic disorders can weight 300 pounds on a 1600-Calorie-per-day diet. Fat tissue is not “metabolically inert” as one poster said. Absolutely false. Adipose tissue is pretty low-maintenance, but it does use energy for cell functions and vascularization.
Indeed, a “genetic disposition” to obesity generally means a genetic disposition to increased appetite. It’s not that the body treats food differently so much as that the mind won’t turn off the hunger signals at the right time. “Zucker rats,” the rodents often used in obesity research, are genetically predisposed never to feel full. Their body chemistry is pretty much the same as a regular rat’s, but they won’t stop eating.
I didn’t really believe this at the time. I always thought that I ate the same amount, if not less, than my thin friends. In fact, I set out to prove the research wrong. For one week, I wrote down everything I ate–even coffee and sticks of gum. I added it all together at the end of the week and discovered that I was averaging over 2,000 Calories per day–far more than I should have been eating with my sedentary lifestyle at the time.
Armed with my new understanding, I made a concerted effort to record everything I ate. I didn’t diet, but when I had to write down every calorie, I did start to think twice before popping that potato chip in my mouth. I needed to come up with an extra 4-5 hours per week to visit the gym. I found it by giving up television completely. As I started to see results, I no longer cared whether Ross and Rachel were going to get back together. I found that the jocks at the gym pretty much ignored me. Heck, who cares what they think anyhow?
After two and a half years, I’ve lost 60 pounds. I know that my struggle is not over–one thing I’ve read repeatedly in the scientific literature is the statistics on those who gain the weight back. It’s a battle. No, I’m not one of those people who can “lose weight easily.” I fought and cried and moped for years and it took concerted effort. But once I started understanding how the human body works–according to modern medical science, not self-help books–things did get more manageable. Now I actually look forward to going to the gym, to savoring my small meal rather than wolfing my plateful.
“Fat activists” have done a valuable service in reminding us that overweight people aren’t any less deserving of respect or courtesy than anyone else. But in another sense, the self-proclaimed “Fat!So?” crowd have done those suffering from weight problems a dangerous disservice. They have millions of us thinking that we are predestined to be obese–or that if someone is fat, it is probably healthier for that particular person to be so! It’s one thing to demand respect–it’s another thing to say things that aren’t just false, but downright destructive.
Overweight people are at significantly increased risk for “hypertension, dyslipidemia, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and respiratory problems, and endometrial, breast, prostate, and colon cancers.” (2) Yes, there are some obese people who never develop those diseases. My grandfather is almost 90 and has smoked since he was 12, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is without risks. Every curve has a few people far to one side or the other, but those isolated cases don’t prove anything other than that some people are very lucky.
If you’re happy being heavy, then I wish you well. But if you’re saying “Fat’s OK with me” while feeling wet around the eyes and a bit flush in the cheeks, please don’t listen to all this “You’re fat and that’s that” stuff. You are what you make yourself to be–you are master of your body. Get into a medically supervised program. If your doctor won’t refer you, then get another doctor. It’s not easy, but you may be surprised how a few simple lifestyle changes can, in turn, change your life.
Alki
(1) Wilson: Williams Textbook of Endocrinology, 9th ed., W. B. Saunders Company, 1998, pp. 1070-1071
(2) “Clinical Guidelines On The Identification, Evaluation, And Treatment Of Overweight And Obesity In Adults - The Evidence Report,” The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health,
June 1998
