Woman offended by truthful advice from doctor

The BBQ Pit
228

Glory, it was that wonderful Optifast program! I was allowed to stay on it longer than normal. I really think I could have stayed with it until I was dead from starvation. At no time did I crave food until after I was forced into refeeding after six months. Then then compulsion to eat returned full force.

The medication that I take seems to have turned that compulsion back off. I eat pretty much what I want to but in small portions because of the gastric by-pass. I’m not obsessed with thoughts of food. Weight loss has been steady but slow at the rate of about two pounds a month for over a couple of years. (So I’ve lost what I regained after the initial bypass loss.)

I would still like to lose another 20 pounds. I’m 5’3" and I weigh 150. I would like to weigh 130 because I used to be told that I was fat when I weighed 130. When I weighed 300, I knew that I wasn’t fat at all at 130.

Weight is not the most important thing. Independence is.

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Hi Zoe, I know from your other posts which med you mean. My psychiatrists have said that it dopes you up too much and it isn’t worth the benefits. I know it’s worth it for you, but have you experienced this dopiness?

230

SusanSto and Kyla - you might want to check out the “Abs diet” by the chief-editor of Men’s Health…

Don’t be fooled by the title (there’s only one of 10+ chapters about abs) but it advocates the foodplan you two already discovered…

I love it - I’m using it and I’ve never felt better.

231

Thanks for the recommendation. I’m always looking for low-glycemic index recipes and foods.

My “diet” is also pretty close to South Beach, as I understand it. I put diet in quotations because I don’t really feel like this is something I’ll stop doing eventually: I like the food I’m eating, and I don’t deny myself foods I crave. I just eat sensible portions of them now.

232

Well it could be simply a placebo effect. Does it have an legitamite, double-blind studies for weight loss?

Personally I have a hard time accepting medical conditions as reasons for obesity. Sure there are some out there, but when a majority of the overweight people I run into attribute it to that, it rather wears thin(eep, that wasn’t planned!).

233

Somebody buy this guy a fucking Martini! How do you take yours, sir?

234

Possibly 'cos men are goal-oriented and realize that calling a spade an “implement for rearranging topsoil” doesn’t actually help anyone, whereas women are more inclined to buy into medical quackery that would tend to suggest roughly 80% (ex ano figure) of the population are suffering from some obscure medical condition that makes them a helpless victim of circumstances, even when this entails ignoring the fact that these strange ailments only affect people in countries and times where food is absurdly cheap and exercise is minimal?

Sorry if this comes over as offensively sexist, but you started it.

(Mal is ~270lb and doesn’t think it’s anyone’s fault but his.)

235

Glory, I take several other medications that affect my concentration and alertness. Add to that the absent-mindedness that some my age indulge in, and the way that depression (mild, but chronic) affects my focus, and I don’t even notice the additional dent that this medication makes.

But I also don’t have to be responsible for other people anymore. It had never occured to me until your comment that I might not have been able to take this when I was still teaching.

236

You know, there were no Europeans before 1492 with nicotine addictions. There were no Native Americans with alcoholism before then either. There were no people anywhere with crack addictions prior to the invention of crack. Why is it so hard to believe that an addictive behavior (compulsive overeating) must be in the presence of the addictive substance (overabundant food) in order to develop?

Nobody is saying this “obscure medical condition” is genetic. Far more likely, it is a self-inflicted disorder that can be compared to drug addiction–someone eats a food (often fatty or sugary) that makes them feel a certain way and then tries to copy that feeling with subsequent eating. However, the body self-adjusts to new substances (and yes, this does happen with food just as it does with drugs), so more food must be taken in to compensate. It’s called tolerance, and it’s real, even though it’s not genetic. Since the addictive substance is food, insulin is affected, just like drugs affect certain parts of the body.

I just don’t buy the “Africans aren’t obese, so therefore nobody can be addicted to food” rationale. Frankly, I think it’s one of the stupidest arguments ever. Some Africans would become obese if they had the capacity to do so, just like some pre-colonization Europeans would have become addicted to nicotine. People can become addicted to anything.

237

Who was I referencing? Science, Cell, Neuron, The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, British Medical Journal, American Journal of Surgery, American Family Physician, the NIH guidelines. You’re the one engaged in quackery which is making medical pronouncements based on little more understanding than a diet ad offers. If you want to find reasonable evidence-based arguments against what I’ve thrown out, please go for it - there are plenty around, because there are *actual * legitimate, interesting battles and controversies going on in the field - which you know nothing about because you think your totally unexplored assumptions tell you all you need to know.

An example of your quackery. There have always been overweight, obese and massively obese people. (Don’t believe me? I give you the earliest known sculpture - from at least 25,000 years ago) The distribution of weight has always been roughtly a bell curve (like height). With both height and weight, changes in diet have shifted the whole curve to the right more or less like so (wish I could get a more exact slide, but you get the idea). So while it’s maybe reasonable to expect that if diet has caused the population as a whole to gain 10 or 20 (or maybe even 30) lbs, then diet can bring it back down 10, 20 or 30 lbs. But it certainly does *not * follow that your body must therefore let you drop five to ten times that amount. Any more than you’d expect to control a child’s height purely by diet, just because diet has increased the average height of the population.

Interestingly that 10 to 30 lbs gain in the population due to diet is just about precisely the amount of weight the literature (and NIH guidelines) say it’s realistic to be able to lose and maintain through diet.

It may be your fault that you’re not 230 or 240 but if anyone’s telling you that you can get down to 160 by diet and exercise, just realize there’s no evidence that that’s realistic. You should read this(click on the link towards the bottom to get the full article). It’s just one side of the argument, but you can see where you’re making some questionable assumptions. Which I would think would be very relevant to you.

I am in this post. To quote myself:

And in that post I also gave a long explanation of why weight loss is much harder than addiction because of homeostatic controls.

238

Yeah, and drug addicts can kick the habit. They might need help, but they can kick it. Let’s send our junkies to rehab and our obese to fat camp.

Stop eating.

Stop eating.

Get off your ass and stop eating.

239

Yup to lose a limited amount of weight. But none of those claim to be able to make a fat person thin. Read carefully. None of those helpful pamphlets talk about goal weights or ideal weights or large amounts of weight loss.

240

Err, they don’t say anything about limited weight loss. They talk about making lifestyle changes that will combat obesity. You can’t just give up jelly doughnuts for two weeks, then take a walk around the block. The only way to kick obesity is to change the way you live. Become active, eat less, get rid of those calories for the rest of your life. This DOES work. Or do you have some sort of genetic deformity that bars you from losing weight too?

Excuses, excuses, excuses.

241

Eat less and eat right, that is. Switching from 3 large pizzas a day to 3 medium pizzas won’t do.

242

You know, I am just really fucking sick and tired of this shit: “Fatties are fat because they eat nothing but pizzas and jelly doughnuts in enormous quantities while guzzling Big Gulps all day and lying around watching tee-vee, and they never walk farther than from the couch to the fridge and can’t climb a flight of stairs without wheezing.”

Fuck that noise. Take your overgeneralizing and shove it up your ass. Yes, I am fat (and therefore, although I am working to change my routine and have been losing weight, apparently not worthy of commenting because I’m such a fat lard), and I’ll tell you how I gained my weight. When I was in college, I had no car. I lived in town and walked or biked everywhere I needed to go. I had enough time in my schedule to do these things, and I also had leisure time in which to do them for fun. Exercise was built into my life out of necessity. I also didn’t have a huge food budget.

Now I live out in the sticks, where walking and biking to run errands is not feasible from either a time or distance standpoint. I have a sedentary job, working at home, and since my husband got downsized, I’ve been having to spend a LOT more time with my fat ass in this chair. (Going for a long bike ride does not help pay the bills.) I am capable of walking long distances and doing physical activities; I just generally don’t have time to do them. I recently had a fairly comprehensive medical exam, and all of my numbers were normal; my blood pressure has always been fine. We don’t generally keep junk food in the house, and when we do have something like cookies around, I don’t gorge on them. I’d call our diet semivegetarian, with almost no red meat. I will admit to eating more calories than I burn, but I would say it’s probably slightly larger portions of regular food at meals, rather than stuffing my face at all hours. I also tend to prefer things like alfredo sauce over tomato sauce on my pasta. I gained my ~70 pounds over about 10 years. That’s 7 pounds a year, rather a slow gain if you ask me. I certainly would be a lot fatter if I had been on the routine you seem to think I follow. I would say that my gain is not because I stuff my face with fat and sugar like a pig and lie around all day, but because my lifestyle has become too sedentary for the amount of fairly healthy food that I do eat.

I haven’t been to the gym all summer – not because I lost my precious “willpower,” but because my work schedule got the better of me and I have been working literally from dawn until bedtime to make all of my deadlines. I would have LOVED to go to the gym. But although I haven’t worked out, I have been able to take time for physical things like mowing our 2-acre lawn most of the summer, and last week I went on a 2-1/2 hour hike, with the first half-hour being nothing but climbing steep stone steps. The day before that, as I was finishing up the last hour of my work for the day, my legs were jiggling so much I could barely keep them still, I was itching so much to get out and MOVE. And while I haven’t lost more weight, I have remained steady at the weight I was at when I stopped going. I’m looking forward to returning to my gym routine, possibly next week, just as soon as I get my work schedule under control.

These are the REASONS I am fat – not “excuses” but reasons. Yes, it takes effort to lose weight, and some people have an easier time of it than others. My mother has been struggling for years, and I don’t think she’ll ever overcome it, for a variety of reasons (although lately she has renewed her efforts yet again). I’m having an easier time than she has, and some of you had an easier time than I am having. Well bully for you. We’re all different.

A while back, our esteemed zev steinhardt, who had been losing weight, described shopping for a new (smaller, but still large) belt and having someone (the CLERK, I believe) sneer at him for being so fat – not knowing that he was coming down in size.

Thanks to people on this board, I’m working on remembering that a child who’s acting up in public may have problems I don’t know about, and may actually be having a “good” day. Maybe other people could work on remembering that not every “fattie” you see is on his way to Krispy Kreme for another dozen, hmmm?

243

So what you’re saying is we should be putting all of our efforts into safe, cheap liposuction. :smiley:

Scarlett, I understand your frustration with the attitudes we’re seeing here; I eat more or less healthy, I walk an hour a day, and I don’t lose weight either (and yes, my portion sizes are probably too large, too), but it is apparent that nothing anybody says will make the slightest impact on the fatty-haters representing here.

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:smiley:

See, this is a bit like me saying “and yes, I probably come across as a snarky, intolerant, insufferably ill-mannered know-all” and not actually doing anything to mend my ways. (Which is pretty much the truth, but doesn’t actually weaken my case.)

Me, I suffer from a common condition known as ETFM[sup]*[/sup], which is the single most reliable predictor of excess weight in the human race. I too didn’t put it all on in a day, but in 25 years I haven’t been below 210 pounds, to the point that on the rare occasions when I have got that low I’ve actually felt quite trim and fit (which is some way from actually being anything of the kind). There’s nothing wrong with putting on 7lb in a year. That’s barely 61 calories too much per day - half a small packet of crisps (potato chips, if you much). It’s letting it go unchecked that’s the problem, and it’s patently obvious that you can’t stand to put on 7lb per year if you have forty years to live.

And there ain’t no-one who can fix me, in this respect as in all of my other horrible flaws, except me.

*** Eats Too Fucking Much**, but you were there already, weren’t you?

245

By Tutatis, me too! We should start a support group. And how about starting a foundation to find a cure… and maybe ask for donations.

Meetings shall be Mondays through Sundays at a good Italian restaurant. :smiley:

246

As long as they do a good seafood calzone, I am so there.

(Considering the state of my innards today, it took genuine courage to write “seafood calzone”).

247

So then excess of calories + inactivity = weight gain. Holy rockingchair, Batman, call CNN!