The Hacker's Diet

Before I had the surgery I had studied as much as I could as a layman to try to figure out how the body and weight loss were related.

I try to take a common sense view of the body and how it works.

First, weight is comprised of the contents of your body. Makes sense. You stand on the scale, it's measuring the force of gravity on the contents of your body. Your bones, muscles, organs, fat, hair, clothes (if you're wearing any), all of that has a downward force on the scale due to the force of gravity. What you're trying to minimize is the excess fat in that body; the hard part is telling how much excess weight is from fat and how much is the water, food in the digestive system, water in your bladder, etc...

That is part of the reason that part of many dieter's rituals include weighing first thing in the morning after doing the morning duties in the bathroom and before getting dressed for the day. They're minimizing the effects of the "extra" weight in the body.

Second, you don't generate your own fuel. Food is fuel, and the fact that we eat food to stay alive is a good sign that sunlight alone doesn't cut it. The vast majority of life on the planet derives food from sunlight thanks to plants, which, through photosynthesis, convert sunlight to sugars and carbohydrates which then is eaten by other animals which then are eventually eaten by us. Or we directly eat the plants.

The point? We don't absorb food through our skin or the sky. We eat it.

Nothing magical about it. Our bodies fuel themselves and gather raw material for repair and growth through our food.

There had to be something to this. As much as we wished there was a simple formula that would allow us to eat all the donuts we want and still maintain our girlish figures it simply isn't true. Spicy foods speed our metabolism? Maybe, but not enough to eat that eclair. Exercise? Average exercise for an hour seems to burn off about a single McDonald's cheeseburger, 300 calories. At most probably a double cheeseburger. I'll tell you that for me riding a recumbent bike for about an hour and a half to two hours at around 7 to 8 miles per hour, according to the bike's computer, burns around 700 calories. It's not a lot when you consider that the average sit-down meal at a restaurant is easily 1000 to 1500 calories (or more, factoring in the starters and accompanying cheddar bay biscuits or breadsticks...)

But despite the fancy claims and various diet fads, it comes down to calories in and calories out. If you have 3,500 calories more going into your body than you expend the body will store it as a pound of fat.

More than what? Your Basal Metabolic Rate, which is the calories you burn just by living. Your heart beating, your brain just working, body keeping your temperature regulated, even your digestive system all take calories to function. If you woke up and sat on the couch all day, your BMR is the calorie count that would be burned by you not dying.

Burn 3,500 calories above that, you gain a pound. Burn 3,500 calories below, you lose a pound. Burn about even, and you stay at that weight level.

There are always variations based on metabolic rates and such but overall you can get a rough idea from the various MBR calculators online like this one. And again, as much as you'd like to think otherwise, your metabolism isn't going to account for why your friend can consume half a pizza and "not gain a pound". Chances are pretty good that if you kept a food diary and activity diary for that friend, you'd find that they aren't eating as much in snacks and other meals so it all evens out for the BMR.

This makes sense. Why? Because you don't absorb food from other sources. Your body can only hold what you put in; water and food, which you expel through heat, sweat, and excretions.

"But if you cut back too much, you go into starvation mode and your body will gain weight."

Neat. I don't claim to fully understand how the metabolism fully works, and I do know that your body will do certain things to conserve energy when it is low on fuel. But it's conserving energy. You become tired. Lethargic. It shifts the source of energy to fat stores instead of quicker burning sugars, going into a state of ketosis. If you continue to lower your calorie intake you'll start burning proteins in things like your muscles.

But the logical part is that you can't gain weight if the food just isn't there. Remember? Energy put into your body is all it can work with. When was the last time starving people carried a stereotype of someone who wasn't rail-thin? Their metabolism would by definition be in starvation mode. What it does is lower their energy use (lethargy, etc.), but it can't make you gain weight unless you take in more calories than your BMR is burning.

If this sounds like an engineering approach to the problem it is. I found a book on dieting that was perfect for my Aspergian mindset; John Walker, founder of Autodesk, co-programmer of world-famous AutoCAD, was overweight and decided to approach the problem as an engineer should. He applied logic and math to the problem and wrote about what he found.

And it boiled down to common sense.

The result was The Hacker's Diet. You can still download the book in various forms for free from the link I provided.

The book breaks down dieting into some very basic points, and none of them should be any surprise. Calories in equals calories out. There is no magic diet plan. Exercise is a supplement that is healthy, but not a dietary fix. Monitoring your intake and adjusting accordingly will lead you to a healthy weight level (and studies have shown that the most effective weight loss results over a long term tend to come from people who keep food diaries!)

The book is a fairly easy read. Take a look, see what it has to say. When it comes to minimum "magic formula" and maximum straightforward logic, the "rubber bag" analysis of the body makes a lot of sense. See what you think by clicking on the Hacker's Diet link!

UPDATE: A link to Jeff Atwood's (of Stackoverflow fame)  blog post about techie dieting...which also happened to mention the Hacker's Diet.

You're Fat. Let's Cut Your Pay

Here's a real WTF. Apparently the Senate Finance Committee passed an amendment to the healthcare bill that will penalize workers not following a "healthy lifestyle". A blog post on the issue can be found here with links for more information.

Apparently it's unhealthy lifestyles that are entirely to blame for skyrocketing healthcare costs. At least, according to the idiots in government that is what is causing the problems. It's like the lack of standardized tests are the root of our education problems, not the fact that our culture denigrates intelligent people and glorifies people who are more into chugging beer and achieving touchdowns...our current President was actually losing some votes because he wasn't someone that voters would "want to have a beer with". That says something about our population.

I'll make it clear that I think our unhealthy lifestyle in this country is certainly not helping anything with the cost of healthcare. What I also see:

preventative care: poor people who wait until they are literally unable to function before being dragged to the ER are in a far worse spot than people who can go in to find out why that weird mole is changing shape on their chest or why the rash is getting painful.

Bureacracy eating time and resources. The bariatric office I have been working with has a person whose only job is to work with insurance companies. I've heard other doctors complain about having to fight with insurance companies, and read about doctors that have had to choose between diagnostics for people or letting them go without certain treatments because insurance companies say they wouldn't need it. Taiwan managed to increase health coverage to its citizens while having the lowest administrative overhead; they did it using smart cards that keep patient records and information, thus lowering insurance fraud, duplication of services and tests.

The cost of healthy living. These arseheads in government are the same monkeys that have a subsidy to corn farmers and tax sugar imports, meaning that the controversial additive High Fructose Corn Syrup...a possible contributor to weight gain...is very cheap and found in just about every @#% thing in the supermarket while sugar, natural sugar, is too expensive and thus harder to find. Gym memberships are out of the budget for many households, especially with today's economy. Eating fresh fruits and vegetables isn't very cheap either. There was just a study released showing how the healthy mediterranean style diet was more expensive than the more calories-for-your-buck Western diet.

Now these arsehats are saying that if you're overweight or smoking or anything else deemed "unhealthy" and not willing to follow some corporate shill's idea of a wellness program, you could get dinged with an increase in your premiums. In a time when people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and are barely able to even get a job, somehow this is going to give incentive to become healthy. Here's a bit of news: making people miserable in the workplace isn't considered healthy living.

Do you think stress will help with health costs?

Do you think misery and stress don't contribute to being overweight? Or strokes? Heart attacks?

Don't you have a responsibility to be consistent in the first place...i.e., stop giving tobacco companies a free pass while at the same time penalizing the tobacco consumers?

What about lifting the taxes on natural food sources like sugar, and instead shifting some of that corn into alternative fuel uses instead of using them as a primary ingredient in McNuggets?

What about taking action to make it cheaper to eat fresh vegetables and fruits instead of salami and Twinkies? The government has no problem artificially manipulating the cost of things like milk and corn. Why not make it so I can buy fresh vegetables and lowfat ham and bread for my meals for less than the cost of a cheeseburger and McD's, all things considered?

No, no. These mustn't be considered. The real problem is that in a time when we're struggling to pay our bills, we need to add one more reason for employers to hate their employees and give another justification to cut costs by trimming headcount when employees, miserable and stressed by yet another pressure at work, aren't trimming their waistlines. All under the guise of "personal responsibility."

I didn't see it mentioned that people who are living a "healthy lifestyle", whatever definition they come up with for that will be, being rewarded. I only see punishment in the material mentioned at the original article. You're fat? Well...that goes into your record. Don't shape up and you might just happen to get let go at the next round of pink slips.

This sounds more like a federally legal way to discriminate. I really hope this gets slammed into the courts and the first person hit with this discrimination wins big. Maybe one day those arseheads on the hill in local, state, and federal governments will learn to get their heads out of their collective rectums and actually focus on something more important than whether or not Bob in accounting is twenty pounds overweight, or at least stop propagating the myth that there's one overarching cause to the healthcare costs.

Hmm...why is it that when discussing health costs, it's never at all the fault of the insurance companies that are making billions of dollars a year? It's never paperwork, it's never bureacracy, it's never making preventative care affordable, it's never our culture glorifying the lifePstyle of gluttany and excess, it's never linked to stresses and poverty? It always seems to be that it's because Bob is eating too many Twinkies. And it's conveniently Bob's fault. So now they're going to penalize Bob.

When I think of it like that I can't help but picture someone handing someone a chocolate bar then giving them an electric shock whenever they take a bite of it, or those oddball countries that managed to get laws that make selling sex legal but purchasing it illegal. Huh?

There are times I'm so fed up with dealing with the intricacies of human interactions that I want to just separate myself from everyone and live in an earth-bermed home in the woods all off the grid. I couldn't possibly be the only person that finds all of this to be ridiculous, am I?

Don't Hire Fat People!

This is a rather inflammatory title to a blog entry. The real issue comes from this article at the diet blog regarding employers being compelled to pay for weight loss surgery.

Long story short: overweight cook at a pizza joint is hit in the back with a freezer door. Overweight dude needs back surgery to fix the injury and solve chronic pain issue. Overweight dude's doctors refuse to do it unless he loses weight, going from pre-injury 340 pounds to 380 pounds post-injury. Employer says he'll pay for back surgery, but not weight surgery.

So they go to court, and the court says pizza people, you're paying for both.

Hmm...

The blog entry is asking whether this should be the case, whether they are obligated to pay for the weight loss surgery.

My take on it, as was brought up in the comments, is that court cases like this are going to be used as justification for discrimination against fat people being hired by employers who can't afford the health costs.

As a fat person I was asked when interviewing for one job whether I would be "able to handle" moving building to building for my job requirements. There was a definite undercurrent of "we see you're qualified, probably overqualified, but we're concerned you're too damn fat to do these things."

I'm well aware that I've cost my current employer, or at least the healthcare system, additional bucks from having surgery. The upside is that I would have cost them more with ongoing treatment of diabetes, cholesterol, hypertension, etc...and the ensuing costs that come from the comorbities.

(Personally many of these costs I also write off to their bureacracies ending up costing WAY more than things should; have you heard of Taiwan's healthcare system?)

In the end, though, the effect will be the same. Fat people won't be hired because they're a liability. They'll tell you there's another reason. There's laws to prevent such discrimination. But how do you prove it unless you're actually told to your face that you're too fat for the job? Are you recording the interview? And if you're in the position that you're looking for a job in the first place how do you afford to hire a lawyer to fight that kind of discrimination, assuming that by some miracle you happened to have a case that could be proven in the first place?

What do you think? Should employers have to pay for such surgeries?

Or is it going to be shared by the majority of people anyway, since costs to health insurance providers ends up getting passed on to every other customer (or employer) anyway? Or in some cases to the government, who in turn taxes the hell out of all of us anyway?

What Has Wings and an Apron? Me.

One of the more difficult things to cope with after weight loss surgery are the reminders of your fat body.

That means waking up every day to a large mound of flesh hanging over your waist and pubic region because some of the excess fat may be gone, but the flesh doesn't go away. The connective tissue is too damaged to "bounce back".

I can't count the number of times people suggested going to the gym or just waiting and the skin would just magically recede. It doesn't. It's damaged. Period. It's one of the casualties of the lifestyle that led me to be nearly 500 pounds, and it doesn't just go away (it won't go away on it's own at all).

I hide it with my clothing. Longer shirts. Pants that cover my waist as well as my hanging apron of flesh. Then I try not to see it, pretend I don't feel it when I sit down or shift the wrong way.

Just when that's out of sight, though, my sleeves creep up and the massive pendulous wings of fat under my upper arms starts swinging madly like a six year old learning to hit a baseball. Sometimes if I'm reaching for something it hits me in the head. I wince just thinking about these things.

I'm the oldest basset hound on the planet.

My wife tells me that my insurance company will cover a panniculectomy and maybe even surgery to remove the underarm skin. I think they may only cover it if there's complications...skin breakdown, rash, infection,...whatever it takes to interfere with life so that the procedure isn't just for cosmetic reasons.

Which, of course, gives them all the leeway in the world to turn it down.

And that's assuming that I have the same insurance down the road and that their terms don't change. And, finally, I have the couple grand available to pay the surgeon's copay. Right now I don't even know if I'm going to cover all my bills.

It's really depressing, but it's not like there's much choice. I either get out and once again slog through the day dragging this extra fat and skin around or...well, there's an alternative that involves just not getting out of bed, I suppose. Just being conscious allows me a reminder of this alien landscape that shifts and rolls without my mental commands, as if it has a mind of its own.

I remind myself that it's a reminder of what not to do again. But it doesn't help me feeling like a freak in public, trying to quickly jerk my sleeves back down over the flesh fudge of my upper arms. I look forward to Winter's long sleeves and jackets and sweaters.

I am keeping my eye open for something to use as a pressure garment over my arms. I tried bandages, those wraps from ACE? They work for about fifteen minutes. Then my skin starts to bulge through where the bandage edges fold mid-wrap, creating some weird scene like the Blob breaking through a barn or shed where the heroine is seeking refuge, the gelatinous goo pulsing and bubbling through the thin crevices between the wooden slats. No matter how much I adjust the bandages they just don't hold.

I hate it. If I'm not covered enough I won't even look into a mirror. I'm afraid of what it would look like underwater...I'd probably be mistaken for some kind of jellyfish with wings.

Calorie Count on Food Labels

Well this is depressing.

I always knew that calorie counts weren't exact on labels. Your food would vary by some percentage because I knew that a calorimeter measures calories by burning the sample; you can get a decent approximation of calories in the food by using samples in the calorimeter tests, but it's only supposed to be a close approximation. "Close enough for hand grenades", I suppose; otherwise you couldn't eat the food if you wanted a more definitive measurement since the food would have to be destroyed in the process of getting the number of calories it contained.

Click here to see why it turns out labels lie.

This article contends that there are other factors that affect calorie intake because our bodies don't burn calories, they digest the food. Things like texture of food and which components are "digested" by gut bacteria before your body gets a whack at it affect how many calories our bodies absorb. Even how a food is cooked, like whether a steak is well done or only medium well done, affects the calories your body can metabolize.

For people like me this is very annoying; I used to track numbers obsessively (and now I track the number of ounces I'm taking in for each meal) so seeing that certain components in foods could or should be adjusted by nearly 20 percent is not only disheartening but a source of anxiety.

What next? That weight loss isn't a matter of calories in vs. calories out? That pills or weeds or sunlight exposure will affect your body weight?

Not surprisingly it was somehow concluded that this was too much of a burden for companies to fix the labeling system for very little benefit. It's sad to see that there is known science behind the argument that the current labeling system is significantly misleading, but it's being ignored simply because it's a pain for someone to have the food properly or at least more accurately labeled.

This isn't a magic bullet, as if finding out that 500 calorie brownie is actually 1,000 calories and that is the real reason someone weighs 400 pounds. But it would be nice to think that the labels we're using to track information for our health is more than just semi-fictional works!

What do you think? Is this something worth having on food items?

Calorie Restriction and Living Longer in the News

There have been a number of stories flooding popular media lately about recent results of a study on calorie restrictive diets.

This blog post nicely sums up why 99.9 percent of those stories have been misleading at best and wrong at worst.

In other words, rely on the media to give you some 10,000 foot view of information but if you want the real story you'll need to learn to think critically about the information you're being spoon fed.

Calorie restriction diets being championed as pseudo fountains youth are nothing new. But now there's a study that refutes the claims, and somehow the popular media still interprets it as being in favor of what the proponents claimed. Funny what happens when you dumb things down for mass consumption.

Anyway...check out the link...mull it over a bit. See what you think. Leave a comment here if you'd like.

More Notes on the Fat Acceptance Movement

I've started kind of following along with The Fatshionista blog and Living At 400 lbs blog lately. I guess the Fat Acceptance movement kind of interests me since obviously I'm overweight.

I'll start off by saying that if you're happy with the way you are, more power to you. If you're 300+ pounds and say you're happy and fit and you feel good about yourself, then really it's not my business to argue with you. It's great that you feel good about yourself.

Nothing I'm saying here is to attack someone personally. My thoughts are focused on the group, the Movement, as a whole.

When I was overweight I accepted my obesity too. I accepted it because change is hard. I liked food. I liked not riding this @#$ bike ten miles a day. I liked not sweating on purpose (I sweat all the time in Summer...isn't breathing supposed to be an exercise?). I saw joggers running on the sidewalk and they never looked happy. They looked like someone was chasing them to give them a proctology exam. Why would I want to cut back on food (I'm hungry, @#$!!), waste my time doing something that normal people looked thoroughly unhappy doing, and ruin my already low supply of clothes with sweat and holes from having to exercise?

So I guess I was part of the fat acceptance movement. Accept me as I am or get out of my way. It helped that I was an introvert and didn't really like people or social situations too.

Gradually I gained high blood pressure. And high cholesterol. Then the diabetes...I was on Metformin and later coupled it with Byetta. I noticed myself hating having those usual fat-thoughts...you know, will this bench hold me? Will this seatbelt reach? On a plane flight I needed an extender for the belt. It sucked. But it was who I am. I just wrote it off as another reason to hate getting up in the morning.

My new doctor at the time...I'll call her Dr. K...seemed like she was ready to just give up on me. Another patient who doesn't give a damn about dying young, ignoring her medical advice...the usual. And she reminded me that I would most likely not live to see my young son graduate or get married or suffer the wonders of marriage and children himself.

*sigh*

She was right.

She referred me to a specialist who took a glance...literally...at my list of comorbids (blood pressure, apnea, etc.) and then tossed his notebook on the desk and said, "Weight loss surgery. You need it. Anything else?"

Dude. He sounded pretty sure.

He gave me the referral and out of his office I went. I'm pretty sure he was used to patients ignoring him...at least that's the feeling I got. Another idiot wasting his time; state (to him) the obvious and move on to the next in line.

I hate it when they do that. I'm not your average idiot and hate being lumped in with them. I'm my own special brand of idiot.

Anyway that's when I started in earnest trying to get the surgery and lose weight. That's also some background on my perspective on weight loss.

So when people in the Movement say they're healthy and all, it's kind of interesting to me.

I've read them saying that doctors are surprised they don't have the comorbidities that overweight people are supposed to have. "My cholesterol and blood pressure are normal!" I used to say that. Then I developed them.

I've read them saying that they eat salads and relatively healthy foods and they're still near whatever weight. I ate salads sometimes. Have you read the labels on dressing? Once you put a decent amount of dressing on a salad so you're not eating something that tastes like yard clippings you end up with a pretty high calorie count, one that easily rivals anything you get at the menu at Olive Garden or (I assume, since those jackholes won't publish calorie information) Applebees.

I'm very interested in whether people in the Movement have honestly done any tracking of calorie counts. It's not hard to do if you're somewhat organized. I was very anal retentive about it when I ended up having to track numbers but I'm even happy hearing ballpark figures. I was shocked to learn that I was probably in the neighborhood of three to four thousand calories a day...I was supposed to be, for a sedentary person, sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred, if I recall correctly.

And anyone in the Movement who claims to not overeat all that much and put in exercise by walking stairs, etc...I can't help but think they're full of it. Weight isn't magical. You put it on by taking in more calories than expending. It's not just a genetic thing that you're fat. You may be predisposed to it, but it still is getting the fuel somewhere to store it...any time I read these claims I wonder if they think they're getting fat from their feet drawing nutrients from the soil or air.

One thing has been consistent in my trials and tribulations. I eat less, I lost weight. I eat more, I gain. The surgery itself doesn't do much more than try forcing you, for a short time, to eat less and feel better with less food...eventually that effect wears off. Somewhat. From what I can find, if you don't stretch the pouch you should still feel satisfied with smaller meals. Can you short-circuit that? Yeah. You can sabotage it. But you'd be an idiot to try to do it.

In the end it's a tool for learning new habits. I could have tried eating this small amount of food without the surgery. I'd have been more miserable for it though, and my stretched stomach would constantly nag me for more until my intake kept creeping higher. I know it would have. Well, I'm pretty sure from past efforts that's what would happen.

So those are my curiosities for the Fat Acceptance Movement. I have been toying with the idea of trying to email the some of the "fat-o-sphere" bloggers and get their perspectives on my questions. I'd be really interested in the answers...any others ever read these blogs and consider themselves part of the Movement? Have you ever tracked calories for your intake before and if so what was it?

Overweight America Means Being Heavier Is Seen As Normal

I've always known that clothing sizes are largely arbitrary, at least for women's clothes. See, to make consumers feel better, manufacturers kind of "make up" numbers. Apparently women don't mind trading a standardized scale for something that just makes them feel better about themselves.

I don't know how they stand it. But that's the Asperger's in me.

At any rate, a new article found here discusses the new trend in weight in America: due to obesity being on the rise in the general populace, people who are on the heavier end of "normal" see themselves not as overweight but as normal weight.

In other words the old joke about feeling better about being overweight by hanging around with people more overweight is being proven as an actual effect.

Because more and more people are overweight and we are a communal species, a species that relies on our interactions with other people to judge, in part, ourselves, the label of "normal weight" is starting to slide higher as the average weight of our society slid higher.

What does this have to do with clothes? One of the points brought up in the article is that clothing for women has begun sliding again among certain clothing manufacturers. As the article points out, depending on the label, a woman could be a size 14 but the clothes at the Conglomomart that fit her are a size 10.

Despite all the noise being made about fitness and health it's good to know that old habits...namely making compromises to accommodate the delusions of an overindulgent society in the name of profit and "feeling good" about itself...are still a constant that can be relied upon.

Nutritional Book Reviews and Blogging?

What follows is really an anecdote that led me to a bit of wishful thinking...

I was at Barnes and Noble not long ago...big surprise...and my wife found a book on the shelves that she thought I might be interested in called Skinny Bastard by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. They authored the popular book series starting with Skinny Bitch.

I started skimming sections of the book and found that it was laced with very risqué language; it was very "tell it like it is" colloquial and conversational for certain circles. It made it easier to read because it was so conversational.

The book promises to help you lose weight through eating well and in the process becoming healthier. I skimmed through some of the chapters, like "Carbs: The Truth", "Sugar is for Candy-Asses", and "Meat: Rotting, Decaying, Decomposing Flesh." You can see where it's going.

But it didn't take long for the book to show a common theme: meat bad, vegetarian good.

The tone wasn't one of reason or science, it sounded like a propaganda pamphlet against anything that wasn't Vegan. Something started tickling the back of my brain.

I looked at the authors. The back of the book stated that Rory Freedman is a "self-taught know-it-all with an epic ass" and that Kim Barnouin is "a former model who holds a Masters of Science degree in Holistic Nutrition". "Holistic Nutrition?" Whenever I have found people referring to themselves with a title including "holistic" it sets off alarm bells for me. I looked up Nutritionist in Wikipedia and found this:
*******
In some jurisdictions such as the UK and some US states the term "nutritionist" is not a legally protected term. As a result, some nutritionists who appear in the media in these jurisdictions may give advice on diet that is of questionable informational value.
*******
Double uh-oh.

My wife did a quick lookup on Amazon for reviews of the book and the results were dismal. That tickle in the back of my brain turned out to be pretty spot-on. The book is basically a preaching to the choir for the vegan lifestyle.

Which, don't get me wrong, is fine for people who want to be vegans. But when I'm looking for advice on nutrition and diet, I'm looking for advice and information, not indoctrination to a lifestyle and propaganda to use as ammunition against people who like cheese (the book even mentions various chemicals that make their way into milk and cheese because they're naturally produced by the cow...more reason to avoid diary and meat!!)

That made me wish I knew of people who read books for their field and post reviews. At that time in particular I was wondering if there were bariatric surgeons or nutritionists who read books about diets and health who posted reviews of such books, who would know when the "science" offered in these books is the truth or a load of bunk (the reviews for Skinny Bitch on amazon were somewhat scathing at times from reviewers saying they were biologists and chemists, saying the science parts of the book were downright wrong).

Anyone know of such blogs or review sites? There might be a market for such a thing if it doesn't exist yet. Otherwise I'll just have to stick to aggregated reviews from Amazon.

It's So Easy to Overeat

My wife and son had some fast food for dinner. It wasn't today necessarily; this particular post refers to a dinner they had awhile ago from McDonalds. My wife tried the Angus Mushroom and Swiss Burger; it's a 1/3 of a pound of meat with mushrooms and swiss cheese (surprise!), onion, pickles, and tomato with a large sesame seed bun.

Seeing as I'm obsessed with nutrition information from restaurants, one of the things I love about McDonalds is that they are very forthright with their nutrition information. By going to their nutrition site, you can easily look up info on particular items or even create a "McMeal" that will compile nutrition information for your meal in total.

My wife's burger and medium fries came to a tad over 1100 calories. She had unsweetened tea, so she had a non-diet soda...scary.

That was for a burger and fries! It's a meal order...you can get this by a number at the menu! Many people who think they need to cut back or are overweight may justify their meal choices in part by comparing it to what other people are having. My assumption used to be that if you can get it by a menu number at the restaurant, how bad can it be? Other people must be getting it too.

But when you stop to think that your nutrition information is based on a 2000 calorie diet, and that most people should be getting somewhere between 1600 to 2500 calories a day (depending on your activity levels)...1100 calories is a significant portion of the caloric intake for the day.

Once in awhile this probably isn't bad. But when it's a habit, you can see how one sandwich with an average side apparently can easily push your calorie intake numbers.

It's not necessarily a "fast food" thing. Going to the nutrition side and getting a cheeseburger and medium fries (and tea or water to drink for 0 calories) comes to only 680 calories. For a meal, looking solely at calories, that's not too bad. I say looking solely at calories because it's not a panacea of nutrition, but if we ate a perfectly balanced meal for every meal every day of our lives then our lives would probably feel pretty boring.

In my little world that is a major problem for overeating in America. Our portions and calorie densities we fit into those portions are so easy to overdo. If you're careful it's not so bad. I gradually had cut back my once-a-week McD's breakfast to just having a McMuffin; that was a 4 ounce sandwich (believe it or not, it's really about 4 ounces despite its size) that came to 300 calories.

But if you have a yummy sausage, egg and cheese McGriddle? 560 calories. The McSkillet Burrito with sausage? 610 calories. The Sausage burrito isn't bad...300 calories. Unfortunately the meal option for breakfast is 2 burritos and a hash brown for a total of 740 calories and 41 grams of fat. If I told the dietitian working with me that I was having that kind of breakfast she's probably shake her head and wonder what was wrong with me. Pre-op, of course. Trying to down that much fat and quantity of food at one sitting would mean that I probably have something off-kilter in my head (the meal in total has 26 grams of protein, though!)

In other words, it's very very easy to eat too much, and relying on restaurants or other people in those restaurants as rulers by which to measure your adherence to being "average" in your eating habits is going to lead you down a road of obesity.

If you want to lose weight you have to be proactive to some degree and start monitoring your intake. So far the best tool I've found for me (aside from the surgery) is to monitor your caloric intake through a journal. It means being organized, it means sticking to your routines of recording things. It's a pain. But for many people it would probably be a real eye opener to what their habits really translate to.

Since having the surgery I now monitor the quantity, not calories, in food. I keep meals to 6 ounces or less. I avoid sugared foods, chocolates, etc, and I have some peanuts during the day when I'm feeling woozed or heading out to do something of some exertion like riding bike or exercising. Just keeping your meal sizes reasonable (especially with the requirement that I try focusing on getting calcium and protein in each meal) can really help keep your calorie count down as a side effect.

But it means having to keep your kitchen scale handy. Seeing as I can't take my particular scale with me, it means prepping most of my meals at home and taking them with me, although I've found that having something like half a Panera sandwich is enough for an entire meal now (even those calorie counts can get rediculous if you have what they sell as a basic meal...the pick two's soup and 1/2 sandwich? Check out the calorie info on their site...)

Restaurants are trying to turn a profit. They do it by giving the public what the public wants. The public wants to feel good about overindulging...the public doesn't word it that way, but that's what they want. So relying on the fast food joints and sit-down restaurants to validate your eating habits? Probably not the best idea.

Anyone else have thoughts or ideas to share?

Being Overweight is a Good Thing?

Science Daily has an article with the results of a study from Obesity from Statistics Canada, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, and McGill University.

Apparently the risk of death from highest to lowest runs:
Underweight
Extremely obese
Obese
Normal weight
Overweight

That's right...being overweight carries the lowest risk of death.

There is a caveat in the article that "Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life, and there are many negative consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes."

This is the first (Canadian) study to show that overweight people may live longer than normals.

I knew there were claims that extremely low calorie diets extend lifespans, but this is the first time I've run across someone saying that being fat is good for you too. Then again, correlation does not imply causation.

The Nation's Obesity Report Card is Out! We FAIL!

Let's take a poll. Should I feel sad or bemused at the results of the recently released results of the "Obesity Report Card"?

We have more attention than ever on obesity.

Schools are adopting these cranial-rectal inversion policies enforcing limited snacks and beverages that are not "healthy".

PE programs are getting more (but probably not enough) emphasis in school-age kids.

Diet books are a multi-billion dollar industry.

Almost every tabloid has at least one story poking at weight issues with celebrities.

Every year there's a new buffet of diet hoaxes, pills, herbs, quick fixes, and fads from which to choose.

New bariatric patients continue to surge into the ranks.

And yet the rates of obesity rose in 23 states.

Granted, this is based on a study following BMI, which may not be an accurate overall assessment of your actual health level. But still it's troubling that there are so many steps being taken to do what in my view amounts to legislating health (how cooperative are most people when they have to do something "just because"?) while apparently the effect isn't quite as successful as hoped. People won't want to be fit unless they come to decide they need to do it on their own, and quite frankly our society is one that values excess and indulgence.

On top of that there's stress from our economy. Uncertainty on whether you'll have a job or a home next week.

Foods that are healthy are expensive compared to the unhealthy stuff. Some people who dedicate a good bit of time to learning about healthy living and frugality can proclaim this to be false, that it is possible to eat well and in a healthy way without spending a huge amount of money. Unfortunately it still takes effort to reach that point, to learn the techniques, and quite frankly, there's an investment to be made in changing lifestyle.

It's not easy. Ergo, we reach for snacky foods and cheaper foods and fast foods instead of the vegetables and healthier choices.

One of my favorite lines from the article is "research suggests that overeating is a key reason kids are overweight." I love it when they find the obvious, as if people are actually overweight because of exposure to some kind of floor wax; were they actually expecting to find something to justify the idea that it's not our own fault we're overweight? Apparently there are still people holding out hope that fat actually is caught by inhaling bad air or some kind of angry sky wizard waves a wand and somehow makes that small three-slices-of-pizza lunch multiple in the gut; it's not because that tiny three slices of pizza should have been one slice, yeah? Something is causing me to simply make calories multiply after I swallow the food. That must be it.

Anyway, there's the link to the article. Take a gander. Let me know if the whole situation is amusing or sad.

Fitness Books and Options Galore

We had the family out recently to a Barnes and Noble bookstore and while there I asked my wife if she had seen any Dummies books on fitness. I had looked in the exercise section but found nothing.

Turned out they were having a display of the Dummies books elsewhere in the store, 30% off, so I didn't see it in the "right" place. Whoops. Did I mention my wife had a professor whose daughter was a cofounder of the company that makes the Dummies guides? Yeah. Neat factoid. Hard for me to type that without instantly thinking of the quote from Spaceballs when Dark Helmet tells Lone Starr that "I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate. "

So she picked up a book on fitness and I skimmed it. I was looking at trying to find ideas for alternative methods to build some strength and stamina while primarily working off weight, hopefully with something that can fit my habits with minimal interruption and preferably minimal expense. Yeah, I know, it's a pipe dream.

I skimmed through part of the book and...geez! I don't think you can really get into the fitness realm with any real knowledge of your arse from a hole in the ground unless you turn it into a full fledged hobby, which is not something I want to do.

Hmm...riding equipment. I have some space in the basement, I enjoy my stationary recumbent (and am considering pricing a newer one out because this one hurts my butt after an hour). What does it say? There's upright bikes, recumbent, elipticals, treadmills, weight machines, machines that simulate climbing, rowers, steppers, freeweights...whoa. By the way, treadmills are most accurate for estimating calorie burn, if you're interested. And many manufacturers lie or fudge estimates. One of the authors had a guy from a company admit they use a formula that boosts the number by some 30 percent so that customers subconsciously prefer their brand over others.

Okay, okay...lotta machines, I get that. How about a gym? You have to look at fitness trainer availability, classes, hidden fees, cleanliness in changing rooms, security, does it specialize or is it generalized, how new is equipment, upkeep in current equipment, fees for initiation,...okay. Overload. Stop there.

Screw it. Let's try something simple. Body only. That should be cheap. It talked about Pilates, aerobics, step-aerobics, kick boxing, martial arts, dance, stripper pole workouts,...AAH! Stop!

Okay, no no. Let's go outside. Biking? Recumbent or straight? Inline skating? It talked about how many injuries the ER sees from that every year. Rules of the road. Trying not to get hit. Bad weather. Ack. Let's go back in.

Pilates sounded interesting. It is supposed to focus on your core muscles, helping you with flexibility and strength through movements derived from animals. It originally was to help injured dancers stay in shape. Flip a few pages...um...easy to do wrong, recommend hiring an instructor, depends on if certified, get DVD, maybe public class for less, join a gym for possible discount, private trainers go for $50 to $200 bucks a session!? Um...well, there is just the DVD option...it recommended going to Amazon for some reviews...oh geez.

So much to learn. Maybe I'll do something any idiot can do and run.

Shoes cost how much? And are replaced after 400 to 500 miles?

Walking?

They last for one thousand miles, eh? And you need to do what to monitor your heartrate? Shoes should have added what support and reinforced whats? And there's an actual technique to walking for exercise? I've been doing it wrong for over thirty years?? Holy smokes.

I remember quite firmly why I thought fitness work was for the birds. Every time I look at that book after about ten minutes I'm ready to shove those pecs and abs and all those other wonderful jargon words up someone's glutes.

Sigh. But I'm still looking at it. I'll figure something out, I suppose.

Airlines Charging More to Oversized Passengers?

I toyed with the idea of when to put this post into the feed, since I already had a sizeable (HA!) story in the queue for today. But this was an in-the-news item and as a rule of thumb...if I'm putting something in that is "time sensitive" I try not to put it into the end of the queue where it could take days to show up.

There is also the fact that while I've heard that this was being considered before I didn't have the link handy; it didn't stop me from putting it into my previous post as an example. Then my wife told me this story had just appeared in CNN that, lo and behold, was about this precise topic. I love it when fates smile on me. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, I smile. And I hit "edit" on the post that needed the link inserted to prove I wasn't just being a smartass and rambling about the topic.

The article pointed out that obesity has been rising for 25 years, yet coach seats are still 17 to 18 inches wide. Another reason this caught my eye is because I read about this issue already in The 9-Inch "Diet", a fantastic book that discusses another perspective on obesity in America, including the fact that theaters with their typically smaller seating have found it necessary after raising a generation to chow down on mega-boxes of candy and buttered popcorn now have to spend money on renovating with larger seats because their patrons are getting larger (that that they're the cause, just a contributor).

The issue here is that airlines are getting one step closer to charging fat customers for two seats on planes. Apparently airlines have had 700 complaints last year from passengers that had obese passengers spill into their seats, and one-third of a small European airline's 100,000 customers supported instituting a "fat tax" on passengers that are overweight.

To their credit, the article states that most airlines have had informal policies to deal with obese passengers that usually involves moving the obese passenger to another seat with an empty neighboring seat for free if the flight isn't full.

There have been lawsuits that claim this is discrimination, but since there are no laws to prevent discrimination against obese individuals I guess this means it's okay to do that (unless you can prove to a jury that your obesity is genetic and thus out of your control).

The funniest part for me was that after an accident from an overloaded plane (that's not entirely fair, it also had a maintenance issue, according to the piece) in 2003 the FAA decided to reevaluate the weight it uses for estimating average passenger size, upping it from 180 to 190 pounds (including luggage). I found it entertaining in that it once again illustrates that these people don't pay attention to what is going on around them...honestly, you haven't noticed that there's an obesity problem on the rise in the US? The figure of 180 was used in 1995. That means they updated it after 8 years. Geez.

The obvious answer is to start making seats that are wider, unless they really don't care about passenger comfort. There are normals out there who find airline seats uncomfortable, hard as it may be to believe. And it sounds from the article as if airline companies have a good view up their butts too...Boeing said that the 17 inch seats suit 95% of they traveling public, and that it's the shoulders, not the butts, that are more often spilling into the next seat. Honestly, wouldn't wider seats solve or alleviate the issue whether it's shoulders or arse spilling over?

So is it fair for obese passengers to pay a "fat tax"? Or should airlines work to accomodate their passengers, flaws and all? I understand that airlines need to work to make a profit and squeezing that profit out is more and more difficult; they need to balance comfort with profit or else there wouldn't be an airline left to have this issue. Personally I'm thinking that airlines have a convenient scapegoat when they should be focused on enlarging seats a bit to accomodate the average paying clientele. They'd rather not deal with it because they already irritate their clientele through asinine security procedures and removing even basic comforts like in-flight meals.

I suppose that there are actually two "obvious" answers; widen the seats, or lose weight. One puts the burden on the business to accomodate their clients. The other is forcing clients to adjust to those who are supposed to be providing a service.

Or don't fly. If everyone is getting fatter and they refuse to use a service where the business won't accomodate them then the airlines will get the message in the pocket books.

Just some food for thought.

Obese Teens: A Case of Neglect?

What follows is apparently an item of controversy; no doubt my opinions are probably controversial as well (as if that's a first). I recently found news stories about two overweight teens with similar but not identical.

One story is about a boy who weighed 60 stone at his peak; for people who aren't in the land of Monty Python, that's about 840 pounds. His mother waited on him hand and foot, offering him 8,000 calories a day in food. Apparently Mom had lost a child to a brain tumor at a very young age and so she became rather "addicted" to tending to the whims of her second son.

The second story involves a woman charged with and arrested for neglect because she allowed her 14 year old son to grow to 555 pounds. She was quoted as saying that she had to work fulltime second or third shifts as well as sleep, so she couldn't monitor her son's diet one hundred percent of the time.

The first story has a passive obese person who more or less allowed...and partook in after being offered...downing way too much food and no activity to burn it off until he ballooned. The second story is becoming a case calling into question government's role in regulating our personal lives.

Both of these stories are a question of responsibility. I try to stay consistent to the belief of personal responsibility when there's no mitigating circumstances; for example, I can't control society or its rules, I can only control my reaction and interpretation of them. While I don't know how successful I am in my efforts I try to acknowledge my responsibility in issues and move on from there while also acknowledging the reality of where and how the situation arose.

In other words a lot of people like to blame their parents for how they are today. Your parents and environment certainly do shape the person you've become, however at some point if you wish to function as an adult or as a citizen with privileges you must acknowledge that you're ready to take responsibility for your actions. Just because Mommy was crazy or Daddy neglected you doesn't mean you get off the hook when authorities discover the bodies hidden under your floorboards.

I grew up fat, overweight all my life. I liked eating. I still do. I love food. I need to work on creating new habits to regulate my intake of food; I need to adjust to a new lifestyle. I may have been influences as I grew up by my parents use of food. I think it was a reward as well as a comfort and who knows what other reasons I do it; in the end, I enjoy it, and I enjoy lots of it. So despite the possibility that I was rewarded with food, shown love with food, achieved some comfort from food, there came a time when I needed to realize that I was going to have to change my lifestyle and not live the way I was simply because it was what I knew all my life and was what I was comfortable with. I am now a parent and somehow I don't know how comforting it would be to have a son blaming me for his problems if I'm blaming my parents for...what, giving birth to me? The buck stops when you "man up" and declare that it stops at the last place you have some control. Yourself.

So the next question becomes whether the government has a right to step in and regulate how you live your life. This is complex because in many respects we're so heavily intertwined in our relationships while at the same time we supposedly want the responsibility that comes with our freedoms (okay, we want freedoms, the responsibility part we usually don't want but is part of the package deal). We want government to offer us support and protection; it's a good idea to regulate drinking laws to prevent people from drinking and driving and ramming my car. It's a bad idea for the government to tell me I can't drink a keg of beer sitting on my duff at home all weekend, bothering no one.

The government is stepping in to arrest the mom who "allowed" her teenage kid to become a quarter ton in weight. I think it's her responsibility to make healthy choices known to her kid; but she's also right in saying she can't live his life for him. She can't monitor him 24/7, and believe me, when fat kid wants cake fat kid will find and scarf down chunks of cake. It'll only stop when the kid decides to take responsibility and say, "Nope, not gonna do it." Even in the case of the mom offering all the food and video games to her son (the half-ton son) he could have made up his mind that this needs to be addressed and find help. I'm not saying it's easy.

You'd be an idiot if you have followed my adventures in stapling and other postings about weight issues I've struggled with and think I'm advocating that this is as simple as just shoving the plate away once in awhile. Then again if you cut out empathy and realistic application of the theory, then I suppose it does become that simple.

They are alleging she's neglected him because she didn't get help for him when it was "offered". Of course I don't know the details, but if it's like other help I've seen offered in various forms to various people and agencies over my life, it's not necessarily free help. She said she couldn't afford to get her son the help...if she's working second and third shift jobs, I'm betting she's not financially well off, and the help they're offering is probably psychiatric, or working with a particular gym program, or some special medical or diet plan. I've never found specialized programs that are "cheap." If the government is offering these things for free then hey, yeah, do it. More often than not I've seen the government simply "offer" you things that are mandated as you must pay for it yourself, but still you have to do it and thus basically are being taxed again. The best example I can cite for people to get easy information about this little "mandated tax that isn't a tax" is No Child Left Behind (okay, I think they call them unfunded mandates, but potato, po-tah-to...).

So I don't think the government has the right to arrest Mom for "letting" her 14 year old son snarf down food like a hoover. Additionally it's foolish for them to get involved at this point citing that it's the government's job to be vigilant against cases where parents harm the child's health when the government is making a very healthy load of cash off of various "sin taxes" such as those on big tobacco (and bonuses to the pockets of politicians from the same companies during election campaigns....).

Then there's the slippery slope; very few would argue that a diet of fast food is healthy in the US. In reality...I wonder if you could, eating small quantities of foods (do you really need that double cheeseburger when you can get a plain small cheeseburger?) from fast food joints and not end up in the dire straits of health later on. But that's not entirely relevant when you see that in America that's not how fast food is treated. We overindulge on the whole. So at what point should the government step in for our own sake? Scales installed at the register so if you're over a certain weight you can only order from the "lite" menu? Extra taxes on high-cal foods? There's already legislation efforts creeping around that will mandate certain places have to post calorie information on menus; such rules are already in place in some areas of New York. Maybe the answer to that is that the government steps in when lobbyists don't pony up enough money to have them look the other way.

More and more I see and hear examples of people trying to shove responsibility off on another entity (and more often than not bellyaching when their lack of forethought backfires). If people want to live an unhealthy lifestyle, let them, so long as they aren't hurting other people. The only problem I haven't wrapped my mind around having a reasonable argument against...yet...is the fact that if you're fat, you're not just affecting yourself. I'm not saying this in the "that fat guy took the last slice of pizza" affecting others way, I mean it in the "when that fat guy had a $50,000 operation because of his diabetes brought on by his obesity, my insurance rates are going up too" sort of affecting other people way. I mean it in the "insurance companies are using his weight problem to justify my $10 aspirin" way, and the "my airline ticket costs more because we have more heavy people on board causing issues with fuel prices" sort of argument. See what I mean about relationships causing the issue to be complicated? There's a similar argument wall I run into with seatbelts; why do I need it when if I crash, it would just kill me? The laws are there because of the lobbyists. In part it's because if I survive the resulting legal and medical bills are distributed through insurance and legal and medical entities that then use that to justify passing higher costs to people who weren't involved in the accident or my have the gall to survive the accident.

But at some point the buck has to stop. I'm all for government offering help to people and having programs in place to help. I'm not all for them mandating morality, legislating lifestyle, or making piecemeal of my privacy.

Fat is Fat...And I'm Reminded of It

If you follow my stories you probably know that as part of my surgery requirements the insurance company required visits to a psychiatrist. I recently had an appointment that got me to thinking about the state of being "fat".

See, he asked how the weight loss has been going. I told him that I was a little frustrated because for the past four or five days or so I've been plateaued at 232 pounds. He asked how much I lost so far. I told him that I lost about 135 pounds since January, with maybe 50 pounds or so of that since the surgery. My wife said that I was focusing all the time on the plateauing and not considering that I lost 50 pounds in two months or that I've lost 135 pounds since January, which they say is really quite a bit.

I think it goes back to the idea that you have no idea what it's like until you've been there. My entire life has been focused on weight in some way.

I've spent my life worrying about things that normals take for granted. Will this chair hold me? Can I fit in the arms of this chair? Is that creaking of the floor more than just a creak? Seatbelts? You have no idea how annoying modern cars are with that now that there are sensors in the seats to determine and adjust for your weight. Toilet seats are a challenge...will it break? Beds? Staying at other people's homes, riding in their car and staying in hotels can be stressful for these reasons and others that normals just don't have occur to them. Even wondering about clothes...going on a short trip? Better make sure you have all you're going to need, since you can't just run to Walmart to get replacement pants if you stain them over dinner.

And other people know. This was always in the back of my mind...they're thinking rude things but are polite enough not to say it. But you seem almost paranoid knowing that they're thinking these things. My parents bought a furniture set for their dining room not too long ago. Mom found that one of the parts of the wooden chair was loose, then it broke. They took the chair back since it was brand new...the sales guy asked if her son had sat in the chair because they may not cover that. They were angry enough to say that they're never going back to that place again...but this was a sales guy asking this. I would have been shocked if I was actually present when this was said, but I know that if I was there this probably wouldn't have come to light. But it confirms that this is what people are thinking.

But Barry, you've lost all this weight since then!

First, that doesn't make it right. But dealing with issues like anger at how fat people are treated by society is a different topic.

Second...yeah, by the numbers I guess I've lost a significant amount of weight. What I haven't mentioned was that the day my son broke his arm falling off his bike, my wife related a story to me. I was riding my bike around the building. We had gone over in a minivan, and there were other people around, mostly taking advantage of the parking lot and playground for some recreation. My wife wasn't riding bike. At the time she was watching my son on the playground.

I headed out on the bike, riding away from the minivan. She said some young girl...not really a young kid but not an adult either...said out of the blue to my wife that someone at school told her that fat guys always drove minivans.

She said she just sort of nodded her head in a disbelieving, "Um...okay..." gesture. I hadn't known about it at the time. In retrospect it makes me think that while I was enjoying the day (before my son's fall, of course) I was just looking like a fat ignorant fool; as if I have no business being around in public.

This is what the public thinks.

I had lost 100+ pounds. But to people who know absolutely nothing about me, I'm judged anew each time as a lazy, ignorat fatass, the same as I'd be with the extra weight.

These thoughts stay with me constantly. I constantly worry about how much I'm eating now...too much for the pouch? Too many calories? Exercising enough? These clothes seem to fit but the number seems way too low for me...I should be in 58, not 48 pants. Chairs can't possibly fit me or they'll break, despite the fact that I'm having this thought while I'm sitting in the chair in question.

It's hard. It's hard sometimes to convince myself to get out of bed, to leave the house, to face these issues all over again another day. Then I shift from my personal demons to knowing, and in some cases despising, the public because of the way they look at me and I just know what they're thinking, why they're glancing back at me or watching from the corner of their eyes.

So yes, I do focus on the short term. I grow more and more frustrated at my plateaus as I have them. I worry about the surgery failing, that I've screwed it up again, that I've failed again. I can't even think of the significance of what I've supposedly achieved because before all the health concerns I think I was a non-advocate but still follower of the Fat Acceptance movement; I accepted myself just as I was, probably because I didn't see why I should worry about something that at the time looked like I couldn't be successful in fixing.

Part of living nearly a short lifetime with this mindset is that I can't tell weight on myself or other people. I can't estimate other people's weight...I hope that I never witness a crime and have to estimate the perpetrator's stats. I told the therapist that I don't know if he's 70 pounds or 140 pounds. Normals seem to find this surprising. Don't be. I've actively not cared about people's weight because it would be another source of depression or fixation on my own problem with weight. Nowadays I've noticed when other people lose or gain a significant amount of weight, but I don't know how much or even what they currently weigh. That's about it.

Somewhere in me there will always be a fatty. I'll be overweight the way alcoholics are always alcoholics, even if they're sober for years. And part of that is accepting the fact that the fat voice will always be in my mind, will always be urging me to fix a cheese sandwich as a snack or saying that one little brownie probably won't hurt me, and I'm always struggling to make sure that I don't slip from trying to lose weight and keep it off, and there will always be that voice telling me that I can't do it.

And I'm coming to the realization that no one else really understands my particular situation.

It's very lonely. In college we had a saying...college is where you discover that even when surrounded by people you can be totally alone.

Momentos of a Time More Lard-Filled

Many people who undergo weight loss surgery often advise keeping a set or two of your "fat clothes" to remind you of how you used to be.

I don't know about keeping the clothes...I have so much crap laying around already that should be tossed out. I still think of myself as fat despite the numbers saying I'm losing weight.

Well...I suppose that at 323 pounds I am fat. Just not quite as fat. "By the book, Admiral." (That's a Star Trek reference, by the way...)

I do have one thing that I used...that I continue to use...and reminds me where I came from. It's an old belt that I bought back at my heaviest. I just measured it and the full length is 80 inches.

I punched another hole in it this morning. Measuring to the newly created hole the length is 47 inches.

So I guess I have my momento and reminder. What would be nice is if I ever were to get small enough that the belt wraps around twice.

Fat Acceptance Movement

Lorraine at The Renewal blog posted an article about finding another blog called The Rotund where the maintainer is an advocate in the Fat Acceptance Movement. She actually (Lorraine, that is) saw the owner of that blog on a segment of Good Morning America.

The Fat Acceptance Movement is all about...well, accepting fat people. I've heard it grumbled before that the obese and smokers are the last two groups in America that it's "okay" to make fun of socially and ostracise. Fat people who smoke can probably cut the tension with a steak knife when they walk into a room.

HA! Get it?

Anyway...yes, the movement. The movement itself is supposed to be about fighting stereotypes and myths and general prejudice against overweight people. Which I suppose is noble.

Part of me is torn on the topic though. While in theory advocating equality and lack of prejudice is a good thing, I think that what goes hand in hand with this is a tacit advocation of the cause and having experienced things from the fat side of the fence I'd have to say that I'm not sure it's a great thing to promote.

The health care industry is already a mess with vultures swooping in to take their share of the pie plus some extra whenever the opportunity arises. Obesity carries increased risk for heart attack, stroke, diabetic complications,...the list goes on and on. Each of these are used by the vultures to help justify their outrageous costs and fees; obese people contribute unevenly to the social system in comparison to the amount they take out for care.

The movement also is anti-diet, saying "dieting doesn't work". I really think that this is a mischaracterization...many diets work. The weight maintenance fails. That's not necessarily a problem with the diet though...it's the attitude that a diet is this temporary thing that once done is completely done, like painting a fence or cleaning the toilet. It's simply not true. You achieve a lower weight by modifying your lifestyle.

But I digress...

Where was I? Oh yes. It's hard to say that I'm against a group that proclaims to support you accepting yourself as you are. There's been a big movement for people doing just that, that body image is an issue for men and women because of unreal stereotypes perpetuated by images in media. But aren't they going to the opposite extreme?

I've been a big advocate for what I call "leaving me the hell alone". It's a system where if I don't unreasonably bother you, you don't have a right to unreasonably bother me. If someone wants to not wear a seatbelt, who are they going to hurt except themselves in an accident?

Unless they live, in which case they impose medical bills that are picked up by shared-risk organizations like the Medicare system or insurance companies.

So what about the super obese? Should we be just left alone without prejudice if we're footing our own medical bills, and then let our bodies fester in disrepair and slowly break down from the added stress our obesity places on the body as long as we're not bothering you?

Part of me says that if it's not bothering anyone else, why is it their business? Leave us alone. We all carry demons. The obese just happen to carry a demon that's visible, probably one among others. I doubt that the normals are without some private demons of their own, and it's simply fashionable to boost their egos at the expense of the overweight.

The other part says that if I have to foot a disproportionate amount of the bill for a guy that lays in a hospital because he ignored twenty years or more of warnings about taking care of himself then I'm a little peeved. It also is the part of me that twitches a little when they...the movement...distorts facts into propaganda by promoting ideas like "diets don't work." It's a half truth. You failed the diet so you instead redefine "fat" as "normal".

I also don't want to give the illusion that I support being overweight because I have been there and can say that there really are a lot of mechanisms in place to rationalize and justify the situation and quite frankly, while they can be a consolation but it only numbs a pain that you're constantly aware of. You're aware of it when you can't fit a seat belt. When that theater seat pinches your cheeks together more tightly than you can pinch them together. When you realize your plate at the buffet has two trips worth of food. When you find yourself second-guessing if the seats in the party hosts' home will buckle under the weight of your ass, or becoming self-conscious of how much you're taking from the dishes compared to other guests. When you're the one that gets volunteered to walk on the ice first to make sure it's safe for the kids or be the anchor for tug-of-war, but you're the last one picked for a game of ball. Unless it's football. When you're fat it's generally assumed by every redneck armchair coach that you "should go out for football because you'd be great at it!"

So you console yourself with things like, "I'm overweight, but my doctor has been surprised because I don't have the complications that people my weight are supposed to have!" I thought I was the only one to use that excuse (many years ago). I was wrong. Looking back I think it's a common delusional belief to make myself feel better for being so morbidly obese, and as with all good things the good health slips away, slowly, chipping away in bits small enough that you don't notice it at first...until you find yourself flipping through a Dummies book on Weight Loss Surgery and wondering how you allowed yourself to get to that point.

I don't know at this point. I haven't dedicated a lot of time to thinking about the topic. What do other people think? Rights of the individual before the rights of the public? Or is this just a splinter group of delusional overweight people trying to make themselves feel better by finding others who have given up trying to feel healthy and redefined themselves to embrace their "unhealthy" state? Or am I totally off base here?

Seeing Others With Obesity and Sharing

I recently bumped into someone I had worked with a few years ago in a local Walmart. He was always overweight as far back as I knew him and I know his immediate family is also overweight, so it could be a habit issue that runs within the family line. I don't know. After a few years not seeing him around I did notice that he looked even heavier now.

He's a young guy, probably five to ten years my junior. Maybe even more.

He's in for a world of hurt if he follows the same path I did. I know it. I suspect he knows it too. But it was never a topic I brought up. It's not my place. I knew that when I was his age I knew I was overweight and at the rational level knew what I was doing to myself to some degree. But the decision to lose weight or take steps to lose weight (and maintain it...there's a difference) are personal. It has to become a conscious decision to change your lifestyle and way of life much in the way Richard Simmons changed his entire life to combating obesity and making it his mission to help others. That mission, made personal, is an obsession that comes to define part of who you are. And it's not easy. It's a big step that usually takes a giant kick in your giant rear to steer you towards trying to achieve.

Or you rationalize it all away in your mind and live with the complications of morbid obesity.

Why do I mention this?

Because I realized that one of the first things my in-skull soundboard noticed was his weight. "Holy crap...I think he's gained more weight." I immediately felt a flurry of guilt for thinking that knowing that is what so many others think when I see me..."Look at tubby!," they think. Women do the opposite of swoon. Children point, gasp, and run away before I eat them. Y'know, the usual fat cracks. These thoughts lasted all of four or five seconds and flowed unbidden but silent as we made some small talk.

I also remembered that after having the bariatric surgery often other people's weight becomes an obsession for members of the WLS community. You end up seeing other obese people and you want to spread the gospel of weight loss surgery, tell them how it helped you and share with them the freedoms and joys you now know with having less weight to carry. It was even outlined in a recent book I reviewed as an emotional change people often experience post-surgery.

I've not really had that happen. I tend to limit most of my sharing about the surgery to the blog and if anyone asks questions I'm more than glad to share with them my experiences. I also chatted some people up about it more than they probably wanted to hear at a recent party but they were drinking more than a few bottles of liquid courage at the time and I doubt I annoyed them too much. At least not when they woke up the next morning. Probably.

However I've heard a few others...such as at support group...where this has obviously manifested as a behavior for them. These were people pretty far down the road from the surgery so it's not one of the impulsive post-op-glee changes like watching The Food Network obsessively like, for example, I did. They have to restrain themselves from running up to other people they feel could benefit from the surgery.

I've worked in technology for a long time. I've found that one of the best things for home users to do in the long run is to get a Mac or use Linux. I make this known sometimes, usually if someone asks for a recommendation. But I've also learned that as crappy as Windows is for security, as detrimental as it can be to users for safety on the Internet, as much of a nightmare troubleshooting it can be...users don't care. It's not their "thing". It's my thing. I enjoy digging into the nuts and bolts of how it works. I enjoy solving the puzzles it poses (sometimes). I am mindful and care about using my computer. Most users do not. It's just a tool. A craftsman loves his tools. Me? A screwdriver makes a great substitute for a hammer when a hammer's not handy.

In other words my passions are not shared by others. And they will be turned off...and associate my interests with negative feelings and biases...if I try shoving them onto others not in a mood to be receptive to my ideas.

Weight loss surgery isn't a mystery to overweight people any more than they aren't oblivious to their weight problem. Their doctors are becoming more aware of telling their patients about the surgical option. Their friends are having it more often than we think, if the ones coming out of the woodwork when I had mine done is any indication. When a person is ready to be receptive to the idea of being slice-n-diced, they'll educate themselves about it or get information from their doctor at first. It's a huge decision that can't be made lightly and carries significant changes for your lifestyle; a post-op can't preach the gospel of WLS as if it were as simple as handing out a pamphlet on the corner and having another person proclaim that they, too, believe. This is put up or shut up; you're gonna have to get cut open and bleed a bit to join the flock.

I think we need to keep this in mind. Actually I think we need to become a lot more mindful of a number of things post-operatively. Our behaviors change. Our interests shift. Our moods, our habits, our need to monitor aspects of our diet, everything. Our perspectives on things change if the surgery is to be success because if they don't, it will fail. The surgery is a tool...one that will change and can be overcome if you don't take advantage of it to change your lifestyle. That's what the surgery really is. A crutch, or stepping stone, to improve your life, to aid you in getting to the next steps needed to improve your life.

This rambling commentary was brought to you by the good folks a Cracka-Cola. Feeding families yummy soft drinks through the use of chemical additives for over 70 years.

Economic Woes Make Us Fat?

I thought this article on Newsweek was interesting...according to the article there has been a jump in obesity statistics since the economy went into the toilet.

There's speculation that the economic problems in the US have contributed to a number of factors that are pushing borderline obese people into the danger zone; stress over possibly losing a job, stress from losing a job, prices rising out of the affordability range on healthier foods, people turning to comfort foods more often instead of healthier food choices among others.

The article briefly mentions some of the government attempts by government to encourage healthier alternatives. To be honest, I don't know how much of a help what they're offering would be. From what I can tell we are an obese society because, in large part, it's socially acceptable to overeat and indulge ourselves. We take cues from others around us and it is tacitly accepted that while being fat is bad and it's socially okay to ridicule fat people it's also not unusual to see people snarfing down two burgers at a fast food joint and restaurants are almost punished if they don't have huge portions for their patrons...diners feel cheated if they don't. So huge portions creep into private lives and become the new standard in our food intake.

So that would imply that becoming fat is one of the side effects of having a "free" economy. We want it, we pay for it, we think we're entitled to it, and in an insidious way this implies that we are somehow subconsciously wired to overindulge once we're given the opportunity and indulgence is given a social nod by those around us.

But maybe that's just my view. Feel free to comment on it...