Blogger: Obesity not always a life-style choice -- encouragement and help, not ridicule, needed

Editor's note: This is a courageous topic on the part of the blogger. It's a reminder for all of us to learn as much as we can about the importance of proper nutrition and daily exercise. Please see your physician before undertaking strenuous exercise.

Obesity is epidemic in this country. This is a fact we all know. Some thin people look at fat people with disdain because they feel the fat person has done this to themselves and could just undo it.

This is just not so.

I have fought obesity most of my life and I am currently losing the battle, again.

When I was 11 or 12 years old the doctor put me on a diet. How I hated sitting there at dinner with my salad watching my parents eat all my favorite foods. Fortunately for me, that summer I grew several inches and all the “fat” went to the places it should be and I was suddenly a normal size for my age. Thank God.

I watched heavy friends ridiculed during their high school years and would not have wanted to go through that torture.

I have an uncle who thinks everyone can just eat a little less and they will lose weight. Of course he is thin, always has been, and doesn’t like sweets at all. Having fought this battle myself, I know it is not that easy.

Contrary to popular opinion, not all overweight people are lazy, do not “pig out” all day, do not eat only junk food and never eat healthy food, or have no will power or self discipline, but cannot get the weight off by themselves as others so blithely think.

You have to walk in their shoes to understand. I’ve done every diet there ever was.

Some I lost weight on, but gained back twice as much when I stopped it.

Diets that don’t teach you how to eat correctly may work in the short term, but you cannot stick to them long term.

One reason Weight Watchers has been a success all these years is that no food is forbidden, just portion controlled and you can continue to eat that way for life. People fall off this diet because they get tired of weighing and measuring every bit of food and keeping daily journals.

There are genetic factors, metabolism factors, physical factors that limit mobility and exercise that also affect weight. Often there are psychological factors, too.

People need help determining why they overeat and how to stop. They need help -- not ridicule.

The health-care system needs to get on board and pay for gyms, nutrition counselors, water aerobics, medications, surgeries, etc. They need to do more preventative care so people don’t become unhealthy.

In the long run that saves them more money than they will be spending. And this generation will teach what they’ve learned to the next and on down the line until we have no more obesity. How great would that be?

I decide to write about this topic after recently watching a documentary program on television about a 29-year-old woman, who weighed over 900 pounds. Of course, she was confined to her bed. She had always been a heavy person, but managed to have a life complete with two lovely young daughters. Her name was Rene.

She knew she could not undo her condition on her own and spent years begging for help. Doors were constantly slammed in her face. No one wanted to take the responsibility for any type of surgery on such a large person. Finally, she found a doctor (Dr. Nowaradan) and hospital that would help her with gastric by-pass surgery. She decided to make her plight public so others would seek help before it was too late.

On this trip, the fire department and ambulance people, after much difficulty, managed to get her onto a special stretcher, into the ambulance and to the hospital. In an interview with her father, who was divorced from her mother, he relayed that his ex-wife had told him that previous hospital visits they had put this young woman on a tarp and dragged her across the lawn. He was appalled and I’m sure she was totally humiliated. Can you even imagine this?

He also spoke about how she always had a good appetite.He said she loved her snacks and “I had to get them for her” as though she would have perished if he did not. Neither he nor her mother took any blame for her condition. Granted when she was able to walk she could go get her eight $1 hamburgers (her daughter told us that menu choice) and wolf them down and it would have been hard to stop a grown woman with children from doing what she wanted even if it was killing her.

However, when she finally was unable to get food on her own, who brought her the food that packed on more and more pounds? If she wanted a burger they could have brought her a veggie burger and a salad. She’d eat that or go hungry.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not blame them for her weight problem, but if they had done this she would not have gotten to 900 pounds. One of the doctors said that people who get to weights this high usually do have “enablers” who bring them food but they also have something wrong with their metabolism that makes them hungry all the time. It is not something they can control. The surgery was a success; she was losing weight immediately and looking forward to shopping with her girls.

Then the unthinkable happened. She had a massive heart attack and died.

The family continued the media coverage because she would have wanted it that way. After her death, that doctor and hospital were inundated with people who had been trapped in their homes for years but were moved to try to change by Rene’s story.

One gentleman was well over 1,000 pounds and had not been out of his house in four years. He was 39 years old at the time. It took a better diet, several surgeries, and exercises he did in his bed to get him so that he could stand up for the first time in more than four years. While we watched him being wheeled out of the hospital to an ambulance that was taking him home, the camera cut to his family at McDonald’s getting huge bags of take-out food. While he was hospitalized, there were big signs saying his family could not bring him food or sodas. There is nothing to stop them from giving him that junk now.

He is going to have to be a very strong man to resist the old style of eating with a family that lives on fast food eaten off their laps on the sofa.

I hope he makes it.