Sister Thin, Sister Fat

My sister wants  little to do with me, which has been very painful and cost me relationships with my nieces and nephews.  I had to stand up for myself the other day, when she told me that my 830 square foot apartment which is in a safe and nice neighborhood was "not good" enough for her and two of her school aged and beyond children  to visit for more then 10 minutes. Really I just wanted an hour or two, maybe to make a meal? I haven't seen them in a couple of years. Was this too much to ask? 

Lest you all wonder what is wrong with me, to have my family disdain me so, realize I have enjoyed many close friendships, through out my life. To me my friends are my family, when I lost a few friends over the last years including Pam who was like a surrogate mother to me, that was tough. That said, I have been blessed by many kind, good and giving friends.  One part of living life to me is making sure to seek out positive and good relationships and community, that is where healing and goodness lies especially when dealing with such immense health challenges.

Even over the last week, a friend of nearly 30 years and I spent some days together. We love antiques-even if I can't afford to buy, I love to look and we made a tour of antique and thrift stores that was quite fun. With another friend, great times and conversation have been made as we make cards and talk about books. Another friend who I met online has been an extraordinary blessing to me. Many of them are like my "sisters". The way they treat me stands in stark contrast to this other stuff.

Maybe in my act of writing about some of this other "stuff", I can do better in letting it go and moving on beyond it. I hope so.  I am praying about moving beyond toxic relationships for good too, I have been on the low contact plan for some years, but that has been enough to cause me too much heartache. There comes a time when you face that some relationships are too toxic for you and that one must walk even for the sake of your own dignity and integrity.  I wanted my nieces and nephews to know me even though I only saw them once every two years or so at my mother's house, and now they are old enough. This is too much pain to carry.

The last few years have been a discovery of finding out about certain personality disorders and why I grew up in a family with no empathy, compassion and where the rejection seemed far harsher then just blamed on the weight alone. I delayed posting this article and even took down one article where I posted about her, you see I loved my sister very much when I was young, we would share our bedroom, jokes, fun and laughter--I have even old letters dating back to those times where that sister seems forever lost. Over time, I had to accept this love was not held in return especially as we grew older.

When she was young, she almost died of a very rare autoimmune condition, I was told as a child, "Take care of your sister!", and I did. My brother and I were even sent to be cared for by other relatives and I remember the very youthful memories, of hospital waiting rooms, whispers and fear. She was 3 and I was 4. One time later when she was a teen, I would save her life, as she was having an asthma attack and my callous parents told her to tough it out which she did obediently, and I screamed and begged for them to take her to a hospital and she passed out and turned blue on the way into the ER.

She would survive all this but then when I got sick, no one paid attention and no one cared. What is really creepy today is that both of us would form an opposites poster, she got hyperthyroidism and became extremely thin, around 120lbs on a 5 foot 10 body while I have dealt with severe obesity. Sister THIN and Sister FAT, like Jack Sprat and his wife. Her with pinched features and the same color hair but an extraordinarily thin body. Even when young she was far thinner then me.

Even getting her thyroid zapped with radiation didn't bring any weight back. The only problem was, why was I seen as a bad person on the opposite path for getting so sick and fat? My brother one time, told me he defended me as my weight was mocked and maligned among relatives, he told them some of what he knew I had faced.

Some of us, I suppose grow up in families where they break apart. Having the close friendships I always enjoyed from age 12 on, where a close female companion was always important to me, I did share this with my sister to around the age of 16, then everything "changed". Did my going away to college at age 17 change it all? Even before then in high school,  I knew my sister saw me as an embarrassment for being fat. You know something is wrong when your own sister pretends not to know you when you approach her in a high school hall.

My sister was the favorite child you see, favored above all the rest. I was the "scapegoat" to the personality disordered and even though I was an A and B student and my sister a C student, my parents favored her with even my brother noticing this as we grew up and the physical evidence being made manifest in my mother plastering her house with pictures of my sister, husband and her thinner children, and no pictures of me and my husband or my brother and his children which are more overweight to this day. Sure I questioned this, but it was to no avail. Everything was about presenting a perfect showroom and life to these folks. The websites that discuss growing up this way, talk about the triangulation that narcissists will do to their own children, and the broken apart relationships.

My sister while we got along into our late teens even though I knew she was the favorite child, as I fought my way through college, and then later poverty and my severe weight gain was told I was "not worthy", "not good" and that I was a "bad" person. Later I would learn how scapegoating works in dysfunctional family systems but my sister drank the Kool-Aid and threw me under the bus without hesitation. Trained to take care of her, I would not understand how weird it was to be told to do your sister's homework or school projects up to her two year degree by one's parents. So the person that exists today has no problem looking down on me, and thinking I am "not worthy" and treating me accordingly. She took to her "training" by my parents like a duck to water. Having heard some rumblings about how one niece may be like me in personality although thin and they hate this fact, fills me with worry for that niece, I pray for her.

She married an upcoming executive that would make 6 figures, at the age of 19, and never lived on her own away from home. She would never face crime, the rented room life with milk crates, jobs like a residential counselor heavy with responsibility but low on pay. Things turned especially when my mother told her not to let me be in her wedding, that my then size 22 body at 6 feet tall, would "ruin" the pictures and I was "too fat". I was 20-21, and she was 19. My sister went along with this. At the time I remember feeling so hated, and this is really when my health was starting to go downward. Today as I have grown into my middle years, I realize how terrible all of this was, but then being so young had no context to understand what I was facing.

Maybe when I am brave enough I will share more, but let me just say, that I know what it is to be alone in this world, at that point in life, I had not developed the close friends save for my college friends who had left and started their own lives at that point in time. Can you imagine the daily bulletins I got about being fat, an embarrassment and worse?

It was awful as as my sister got older she jumped on the narcissistic bandwagon. My mother comes first to her. In fact pleasing, appeasing and being like my mother comes first. She even wears her hair in the same exact style of my mother and seeks to dress like her, like a little Mini-Me. Personality wise there are matches too, an over-focus on appearances, no close attachments and very few emotions outside of anger. One thing, trying to relate or talk things out does not work here. Any desire to meet these folks half way, discuss "feelings" is like bouncing a rubber ball off a brick wall that smacks you in the face, especially since many feelings are not even shared or related to. You either toe the line or get out. The worse to me is all the being lied to constantly.

As she grew into a upper middle class stay at home mother with 4 children, and I struggled with poverty and the rest, she seemed to gaze upon me more and more with the same disgust as my mother. Now I understand the temptations of sibling rivalry and such, and one's own sin of envy, but I have great relationships with many people who live at all economic levels, so just the fact things became this way were a disappointment. I certainly was willing to look beyond the differences from my direction.

My sister was thin, I was not. There are people I have in my life who love me even despite me being fat and my other challenges. Sadly my sister is not one of them. I do grieve this but I can't go running to the empty well anymore. I wanted the laughing fun girl who cared about me back who was a dear sister to me but I realized this was a hopeless dream.  I am happy to be me in the way, that I am glad I was able to grow into my own person. I think being a Golden Child, can form a gilded cage of its own that becomes a trap where a person only cares about appearances. At least I am free of all that. Sister Thin, Sister Fat. 

Medical Update: My Nightmare Body and Scary Medical World

I gained 30lbs in 2 and half months which is very scary given I was exercising almost everyday making sure to never miss a walk and was eating healthy enough. I did have company and the weather has been great so was out and doing far more, so very exhausted, it could be water weight.
I feel like time is short, so I was running around trying to "live life" and do things with a friend while the weather allowed it and I was out of my housebound cage.

The nurses at my kidney doctors were even in shock I gained so much and so fast. The expression on their faces was very interesting. My husband said "Remember at Weight Watchers, they'd notice you gaining 30 even within 2 weeks and losing it!" Yes I remember that, the ladies there doing the weigh ins, one told me to go to see a doctor. I told her I had serious medical problems already being monitored.

When I tell you living in this body is a nightmare, I am not holding back anything. It is a definitely nightmare. Diet and exercise make you lose weight? What an absolute joke. I feel like I live in an alternative universe having been cursed with a monster body.

My kidney stone the one caught in the kidney GREW, they told me that I could have surgery to remove it, very risky, or take pills to dissolve it, only problem is the medication to dissolve it contradicts with Spiroaldactone, so that means the doctors have to find another congestive heart medicine and I get to have PCOS or endocrine androgens raging through my body but I told the doctor that is less risky. Anesthesia which is needed in the other procedures feels like a death sentence with my breathing problems.

I found out this, that I am too fat for any of the EWLS tables where they blast the kidney stones with sonar [who determines these things?] even two hours north of me at a larger medical center. I am seriously scared to be honest, it is a lot of stress. If you know of a place that can work on someone at my size [486-516lbs] please tell me. Please pray for me. Nothing seems real with this body. I had enough to deal with medically before the kidney stones knocked on the door.

I told the kidney doctor that I need an endocrinologist to get to the root of why this is happening. He has made a note of my history of Pseudo-Cushings-I showed him the old medical records of the high cortisols. I know for a time my parathyroids were off, and they are testing the PTH levels though those are normal now, so I do not know what is going on. I know ever since the kidney stones started a year ago I have not felt right. So many chills, exhaustion and other weird signs. My body temperature is always very low--95 or 96. The medicine I'm on to keep the kidney stones at bay, allpurinol has worked but how long can I stay on it without side affects? I even drank some Braggs Cider Vinegar reading on line it dissolves kidney stones and that is not pleasant tasting, even watered down.

I am praying but I feel often overwhelmed with my own body.

Giant and Fat

Fat and tall can go together!

Can Birds Get Fat?

World's Fattest Man Dies at 900lbs

World's Fattest Man Dies The Obesity Epidemic in The Pacific Islands.

The factors for this epidemic of obesity are a dramatic decrease in physical activity and a dependence on a Western diet. The traditional foods of the islands such as fresh fish, meat and local fruits and vegetables have been replaced by rice, sugar, flour, canned meats, canned fruits and vegetables, soft drinks and beer. The total population of the 21 island nations, territories and commonwealths in the Oceania area is just under 2 million. In

I get the feeling that the obesity problem in Polynesia goes far deeper then people eating some spam and rice instead of fruits and vegetables. Their bodies seemed to have been altered via whatever is being put in Western food. You see this globally, everytime American food products hit the shores everyone starts fattening up WHY? People ate food before, and there is no proof all ate perfect "diets" in earlier times. Also one factor is poverty obviously too impacting this. There are some people who physiologically are more prone as "canaries in the coalmine" as well. What did the 900lb man eat? They certainly don't look too wealthy, what did the wife cook and make for him? I am sorry to hear that he has died but I am not surprised the world's fattest man came out of Polynesia either.

I love stamp collecting!

My stamp collection is growing. 

 In another life I wouldn't mind being a antiques dealer or stamp dealer. I now have around 4 albums and need to purchase Vario pages for the mint stamps. I am starting to specialize now in a series of countries of my choice.

Even when poor one can find cheaper stamps via ebay or even donation. A friend's uncle even has been paring down his collection and sending me envelopes full of worldwide stamps. Thank you! :) I will be sending him a card soon this week.

Here are some more pictures of my stamps.

The Best Stamp Collector's Forum

"Fat City": And This is Why The Fight Against Obesity Will Fail

Fat City

Another diatribe by a doctor about the "bad" fatties who eat too much even if she gives a few nods to the malfeasance of the food manufacturers.

Narrow science.

Narrow minds.

Narrow answers that have failed for 50 years.

Thin people whose bodies operate correctly who will never get it.

Another one brainwashed by the medical establishment in her country.

The usual stop eating lie followed up by the you'll be automatically thin lies.

One can see the hatred right here....notice how she comments with the attitude of an "exceptional" fat person speaking about Emily not smelling and her wearing a big suit. Thin people don't eat pizza? One line sums up her attitudes:

"Emily’s family ate like the bejesus. I went to her house once a month for pizza: heavy, oily discs of cheese half a metre across."

As long as doctors hate fat people, the science and treatment of obesity will remain restricted forever. Does this woman feel this way about the parades of those who come with STDs who are promiscuous to a clinic, or maybe about those who smoke with lung cancer or those who have injured themselves doing extreme sports?
 

"I knew that – barring underlying lung disease – obesity was one of the greatest risk factors for life-threatening pneumonia in young people. I felt a responsibility to tell her that her excess fat had harmed her in a way she may not have realised. Every day before my ward round I would say to myself that I was going to broach the subject with her. It seemed a good opportunity to intervene. And yet each time I stood by her bed and looked at her bedside table piled high with literary novels, open blocks of chocolate and teddy-bear biscuits, each time I lifted her pyjama top and pushed my stethoscope into her soft white flesh, I couldn’t do it. I was embarrassed to mention her weight; it felt like I was a puritan taking the high moral ground. It felt mean."

Why doesn't she think this out more...am I weird to think that people today have locked their minds in too many boxes where they no longer can think critically?

People do not want to be fat. Fat brings untold suffering!

So why are they failing to "stop" being fat?


" But usually counselling people to lose weight is hopeless. Then there are the questions of morality, personal responsibility, associated diseases, resource allocation, quality of life and aesthetics. I have moments of clarity – I think of the way Emily ate – and obesity seems simple: more in than out. Then I am engulfed once again by the high science of genetics, by the concept that obesity is a disease."

*

 
"I love reading articles with titles like ‘How I Lost 25 Kilos’, even though the answer is always the same: I ate less."

Sure that is what you are told, but how many is it working for?

How many fat people feel more hunger?

How many fat people have lower metabolisms?

What is being done to endocrine systems in a society of low nutrient, adulterated food that is full of toxins?

Come on, think these things out.

As for fat being ugly, the quest for beauty and social acceptance does not mean those things are guaranteed.

So the fat get sicker, and still the fat wins? Why?

As for precision, one thing about scientists is the overly linear minds see the trees and miss the forest. Ok, your medical tools are not suitable, and so who decided they should only be useful for the thin in a population growing more fat? Who determined there should be no neck braces for the very large?

 

"I listened recently to a neurosurgical registrar describing the difficulty of finding a spinal fracture under 10 centimetres of adipose (fatty) tissue. Neurosurgeons love precision; one false move on the inside and you won’t remember your mum. The registrar’s voice was filled with a kind of shocked horror. She had to send the car-crash victim to the scanner mid operation, with a metal screw embedded in his neck so the surgeons could find their bearings beneath the mattress of fat. Post-op, none of the neck braces were big enough to fit. To immobilise the man’s spine the team used sandbags."

It gets even worse. What is wrong with these people. Why do they dismiss their patients so much? Can any real help come from someone who from the get-go sees you as a human atrocity and to blame for your condition. I think not!*
 

"This year I started work as the physician in an obesity clinic with a group of bariatric surgeons. No one else really wanted to do it. The attempt to help people lose weight is generally seen as one of the most futile acts we as doctors of internal medicine can perform: pretty much all we can do is make you feel crappier about yourself than you already do. But the surgeons can do something: they can clamp a band at the top of your stomach, cut half your stomach out or bypass part of your small intestine so food is not absorbed. The waiting list for our clinic is long. One of my patients gained 60 kilos between referral and consultation. Some of our patients have become so fat they can walk only five steps without needing a rest. Many are only in their 30s. My role at the clinic is to tighten up their diabetes control, make sure they don’t have a catastrophic hormonal condition that has made them fat (no one ever does), treat their high blood pressure and discuss eating and exercise habits. "

Look at the line I underlined and bolded

"No one ever does", so I wonder how many remain undiagnosed.

The Doctors are brainwashed to see hormonal disorders as rare. Yes Ask the woman whose heart was damaged by undiagnosed hypothyroidism.

I believe diabetes sets people up to gain weight, turn things on their head. Don't just assume.

By the way the stomach surgery is failed. You can't do better then that?

Why don't any of you ever consider that the approach is failing?

Where are the freethinkers in the medical establishment?

Did they all get drummed and weeded out?

Yes you do make fat people "feel crappier about yourself then you already do"

So why not change it?

Why not rethink what you are doing?

The weird stuff about chewing food slowly is strange, she ate and went and was thin, so why can't fat people?

I've puked enough from illness so really all they really are doing is making fat people SICK to make them THIN.

And none of them ever thinks PERHAPS WE SHOULD CHANGE OUR APPROACH?

"Now, every time I eat I imagine the food going down my throat, being squeezed by the muscles in my oesophagus before landing with a splat in my smaller-than-I’d-thought stomach. I find myself chewing more and waiting between mouthfuls. Sometimes I even put my fork down on the side of my plate between bites. I’d never done that before; I’d been an eat-and-run kind of girl. I was not at all overweight, but by the third clinic I’d lost 5 kilos."

What does she consider a ridiculous amount of food? Three meals a day? Eat a hamburger instead of a carrot for lunch? The mind boggles.

" My brother drank a lot of whisky, smoked, and ate a ridiculous amount of food."

Then she goes on into how much fat people cost. I mean whose going to question those destroying our food like Monsanto when there is a ready scapegoat ready to blame right in the room? Later in the article she seems to call out the food manufacturers but then backpedals on it.

You know the people who supposedly "choose" to be fat?

She seems to have this thing about people sweating.

Hmm it's always interesting to me how these thin types get offended by fat people sweat but in the same breathe will assume you are lazy and never move.

". That only gets them to around 120 kg, which isn’t even close to the weight of many patients I see breaking into a sweat on the walk from the waiting room to my office, their knee joints slowly disintegrating. "

" I feel terrible typing these sentences. I apologise; they are ugly."

Yes they are ugly

So why don't you realize you've been indoctrinated and are being unfair to fat people and that all you have to offer is more answers and judgments that WILL FAIL.

The lectures about food get crazy. The doctors and THIN society of people whose bodies work normally assume every fat person is inhaling the bad food. What do they eat? Does she go three days without eating?

To be frank, if getting rid of chocolate, cheese, pie, cookies, fattening food, ended obesity, there'd be barely any fat people. How many fat people constantly diet or have to pay attention to everything they eat?

But none of them ever think this stuff out.

 

 What if she couldn’t dump the biscuits? What if all I had done was intensify her guilt and self-hatred?

Why do they assume every fat person is pigging out? In this paragraph she attempts to sound nice and understanding and yes while there are some food addicted fat people out there, but why does she assume this applies to ALL?

I do not ask them to describe the biggest meal they have ever eaten or if they’ve ever eaten two dozen doughnuts in one sitting. I ask what I need to know to minimise the chances of harming the patients with inappropriate treatments. I do not wish to humiliate them or shame them. I do not wish to turn my fat patients into freaks. It takes time for them to trust me enough to tell me the truth about the mind-boggling volumes of food they consume.

Here she refuses to understand a concept that I have explored on this blog.

Fat people often are HUNGRIER

They have satiety issues.

Instead she decides to dismiss all of this, and assumes the fat are all decadent pleasure seekers.

I have told doctors, I wish I could skip meals, I sometimes hate having to eat or cook or even focus on it. The times I am sick, and feel like I could say NO too food forever come as a RELIEF on one end. I often have thought what if this was true without the "sick" part.  But I get full blown hunger pain that never lets up. I have been training myself to bear physical hunger to even keep from gaining weight, but their insane starvation diets would make it unbearable. So what does she say here, fat people are just a bunch of libertines who seek after pleasure. Don't thin people do so?

What in the medical establishment is having them refuse to admit satiety disorders or that something is happening to people to make them TOO HUNGRY?

Years worth of doctors calling me a liar, when saying how ill severe diets made me feel. Having to research for myself the realities of insulin resistance and high androgens. I am maybe paying the price for the higher protein-lower carb diet that at least got some of the weight off now with the kidneys checking out and saying, NO more!" but at least put a dent in the terrible physical hunger.

"I once attended a hospital lecture on the genetic determinants of obesity delivered by a specialist physician. The doctor giving the talk was very fat. As he went on, his face got red and stains of sweat spread from his armpits. Obesity is genetic, he argued, wiping his brow: obesity is a disease. He said: If you make a fat person thin, you are sentencing them to a lifetime of hunger.
This depends on your definition of hunger. Eating is not a purely rational, biological act. I can give you a diet that will keep you full all day and make you lose weight, but it won’t be very entertaining: it will be mainly made up of watery vegetables like cabbage and celery, egg whites and very lean meat. The pain of abstinence, of unmet desire, is something quite separate from the pain of an empty stomach. The pleasures of eating are complex and multifaceted. In our society, consumption is a form of entertainment and pleasure. Eating is part of this: from the theatre of a meal at a fine-dining establishment to a bag of chips augmenting the television-viewing experience. Most people do not overeat because of a feeling of hunger emanating from the stomach; they are giving in to a desire to consume – they are seeking pleasure or relief, or hoping to fill a void."

The anorexic friend is correct in that there is far more help for anorexics rather then that fat. Maybe the refusal to help fat people is why some of these doctors and others are so prejudiced. I have said put me in a lab/hospital and watch me eat and live, and see how it goes. They can see what I live with and how much I have suffered and then perhaps then they will shut their mouths about how much of it is chosen or from "bad behavior".

"I had a friend who had been anorexic and spent her teenage years in and out of hospital, being fed through a nasogastric tube. She recovered in her 20s and managed to channel all of her intrusive obsessional thinking about food into athletics. One day she said to me that she didn’t understand why she could be hospitalised against her will for not eating enough, and yet there was no limitation on how fat you could get. It was completely unfair, she said, that you could be refused alcohol if intoxicated but roll into your local fish-and-chip shop 100 kg overweight and be served the equivalent of a week’s worth of calories for lunch."

She is right that there is a problem with the companies researching obesity who are making and selling food that makes us fat. She needs to read this book Salt, Sugar, Fat and maybe she can figure out that the causation of obesity goes far deeper then poor ethics and low personal responsibility. I have sought to remove all corporate and marketed food, but affording this 100% is another matter. She seems outraged though that some people would surmise that something is happening in the environment to make such large numbers of people fat. Why the outrage? Is it because it is easier to blame the fat even though their numbers at least in America are almost 40% of us?

In thousands of labs across the planet, medical researchers are trying to find the cause of, and cure for, obesity. They examine genes, chemical exposures and metabolic pathways. They experiment with amphetamines, anticonvulsants, probiotics. Some of this research is funded by the companies that make and sell the food that makes us fat. In thousands of other labs across the planet, food scientists and marketers are working on ways to make you eat more. They employ highly sophisticated psychological and physiological research to this end; they examine the effects of colour, unit size, price, texture, packaging and advertising on human desire. Look around you: who is winning?
In some ways, scientific research has taken obesity outside the realm where it is a consequence of choices made by a more or less free-willed individual in a more or less free society, which nonetheless disapproves of excess. In current medical research obesity is often conceptualised as an unavoidable disease. It’s your genes, your metabolism, the chemicals in your environment, what your mother ate when she was pregnant, whether she fed you at her breast. It is everything but what you choose to put in your mouth.

She continues with this ditty:

"We are attracted to what is forbidden and will resist only if we have a compelling reason to do so: pain, punishment, family disintegration, death."

Death isn't even working for fat people lady...

I am dying of being fat.

And I still can't get the weight off or lower the calories low enough to take off real weight. [Yes I am 200 under the peak, but I am still very fat]

Fat is so stigmatized, you are telling me with a straight face, that the suffering of the fat isn't compelling enough?

Ok WHY?

Think that one out too.

Maybe its NOT BEING CHOSEN!

.
Eating ‘bad’ food is a relatively benign transgression; you can do it in public, you can do it in the park, in a primary-school playground

I see tons of thin people eating "bad food" too

So prove to me

thin people never eat bad food.

And one thing if you are over a certain weight, you will not be eating bad food in public.

I am lactose intolerant and have not been able to eat ice cream in 7 years, but I doubt a nearly 500lb woman could go have a big ice cream cone without some eyes boggling out at her.

I sat and watched at the stand where I was getting a grilled chicken sandwich the numbers of thin people buying ice cream.

Am I to believe that is the only thing they ate that entire day?

With the food, we need decent alternatives.

We need non adulterated food that ends hunger when you eat it and is NOT ENGINEERED to PRODUCE higher levels of hunger for profit.

We need GMOS stopped.

We need a society that replaces the social contract, where the poor are able to get decent food and there are more pleasures then brain-dead watching of TV and eating where people can have land and places to explore and make things.

People need a place of worth and being. The society is cracking up.

Fat people are canaries in the coalmine now for a breaking apart sick society.

Yeah I said it.

 But when you pound on the responsibility of the individual?

What more can they do?

Your answers of weight loss surgery and lectures to eat less and the rest are FAILING

The diets are failing. Some work short term. Some get a small amount of the weight off like me but not the entire amount.

But there's no fat people over a certain weight turning into THIN people

WHY?
This isn't just a problem of a few people anymore. Obesity is increasing, you know it, so why not address the matter that your answers have failed. The man in the below hates himself because he has been told to. Her whole article tells fat people, they deserve all their suffering!

What about the responsibility of the individual? And of society? My patient cries because the highlight of his day is returning from the supermarket with a plastic bag full of junk that he will eat and drink in his empty lounge room. What can I do for him? I can threaten him with his early demise, intensify his shame. I can offer him some evidence-based motivational lifestyle interventions – swap Coke for Diet Coke! Prescribe exercise? Walk for an hour at an average pace and you’ll only burn off the equivalent of one slice of bread. I could take the old-fashioned approach and wire his jaw shut. I have no hope of resolving his loneliness, his hopelessness, his lack of a job. I could, and do, refer him to a psychologist – if he’s lucky he may land one who is talented and sensitive and will try to get to the root of why this young man hates his own guts. More likely he’ll be offered a few sessions of behavioural therapy that will make everyone except him feel better.

This comment is wrong. NO it does not.

"To get that fat takes dedication and persistence. "


Try and think outside the box.

Try and realize something MORE is going on in a society where so many are getting fat.

Doctors can do more, but they need to rethink things they consider "truths" and look at the bigger pictures.

The above article means the science and medical establishment is woefully failing when it comes to obesity why? Throwing more money at it and asking the social workers, dieticians, psychologists who have already failed  to deal with the problem isn't much help either.

How about questioning what you accept as unbreakable truth and thinking OUTSIDE THE BOX for once?

Think about it.

The doctors I work with have an excellent grasp of the bio-psycho-social factors that contribute to our patients’ states, but we are only doctors. All we have are the tools of our trade: our ears, our voices, our hands, our pills and our scalpels. The waiting rooms are full, the waiting lists are long, the demand is swelling. Obesity is in many ways the logical endpoint of the way we live. Prevention beats palliation, but we’d need psychologists, motivational speakers, social workers, dieticians and physiotherapists to work with us in order to have any hope of tackling the problem. We’d need policy makers and activists. All we have are doctors like me.

Her last sentence truly bothered me. As if she never eats herself. At least she doesn't pay for every bite eaten.

Are you going to eat it?

So wonder us fat people are getting it worse and worse, and this is one of the people meant to HELP US? Would she even listen to anything I had to tell her? Or would she tell me I am a bad person for eating anything and shove me back in the fat box that is FAILING all of us?

See:

Watch Out For Fat Hating Doctors!

Letter to Obesity Researchers