Bulimia

When you can't control your eating and you're desperate to lose weight, there are a lot of imprudent things that you can do to try and deal with your situation. One is starting to smoke. Smoking increases metabolism and suppresses appetite. A lot of the ever so slightly voluptuous women in Hollywood who become thinner after they become more famous are helped along by picking up this nasty habit. They trade in one problem for another.

It's also possible to start throwing up after you eat (bulimia nervosa). I will admit that there have been times when the thought that the answer to my problems could be as simple as putting my finger down my throat or taking some ipecac after binging or eating too much. This "solution" is very dangerous, of course. It carries a lot of health issues, one of which is heart problems.

In the end, I just couldn't manage to do it, appealing as it was to have my cake and not get fat from it, too. The bottom line is that I'm just not the type of person who can force myself to vomit up the food I've just ingested. Perhaps it has to do with growing up poor and not feeling that it's okay to spend money on food then flush it down the toilet. I could also simply have been frightened of the consequences, but I don't recall that being a part of my thinking process at the time that I rolled the idea around in my head.

Just today, I had a revelation. I was watching an old re-run of the medical drama "House" and he was sitting in the clinic with a patient and said that her bad breath and gnarly-looking fingers indicated she's been regurgitating her food. I had known for quite some time that both of these were signs of bulimic behavior, but hearing it said aloud made something click in my mind about a client of mine.

I sometimes meet with a client in a small space and she often has very bad breath. In fact, the breath issue is so bad at times that it lingers in the air after she has left unless I specifically air out the meeting room. I'm sure that anyone who uses the room immediately afterward can smell it as some odd funk. I didn't think much of this because she's not the only client I encounter who has halitosis. However, she is the only one with deformed fingernails and chewed up fingertips.

I had noticed both the breath and fingers for quite some time, but I never put two and two together. This particular client is quite slender, though certainly not emaciated. I'm pretty sure that she is selectively purging her meals. I mainly think this because she is not engaged in any work or hobby that would explain the condition of her nails and fingers. The worst finger of all is the index finger on her right hand, a prime candidate for sticking down her throat.

I like this client and now I feel sorry for her as well. She's always been friendly to me and we've gotten along well. She doesn't appear to judge me by my weight despite being thin herself. I now wonder if she might have some hidden understanding and compassion for what I face.

Not About Excuses

Reading the article that I linked to in the previous post, one might conclude that researchers are trying to help people absolve themselves of responsibility for their weight problems by explaining that their problems are genetic, chemical, and neurological. Though certainly it would be heartening if the world at large could develop some compassion for the fat people who they currently despise, the point is not to provide excuses. The point is to provide answers.

If you're fighting a war and you keep losing, you don't simply keep charging into battle using exactly the same tactics which lead to failure. You reevaluate the situation and try another plan of attack. In the battle to solve the problems more and more people are having with their weight, it's important to understand why all of the "common sense" answers aren't helping. It's all well and good to say, "it's simple, eat less, exercise more," but clearly the problem is more complex than that. For some reason, people cannot do these thing or they are not sufficiently effective.

The point of research is to find a new path of treatment which has a higher chance of effectiveness. Treating everyone who gains weight as if they were the same doesn't work, particularly when you treat the person who is 100 lbs. overweight in the same manner as someone who is 10 lbs. overweight. I've known that for a long time. One reason I despise doctors is that every time I've visiting one for a problem, they say, "you should lose weight," as if it was as simple as that. They can offer meal plans and tell you to exercise, but treating the problem so simplistically has not worked for me. It's something that has failed more than just this blog author and it's failing more and more people all of the time.

Complex problems may require complex solutions, and increased insight into those factors is going to help people find better ways of dealing with their problems. Though I still have to battle my bodies sluggish response to leptin and failure to inform me that I'm full, at least knowing that this is an issue helps me formulate the proper mindset. If I'm still hungry after having eaten "enough", I may feel enslaved to my biological needs. If I know that this is a failure of my brain to recognize that I've eaten enough, I may be able to rationalize it rather than think I simply need more food than other people.

Though the research that indicates that we were born to be fat can seem discouraging, it doesn't have to be. It can be about finding answers through understanding the problem more thoroughly.

A Poorly Built House

It's all well and good to talk about having parents who didn't do well by me in a nutritional sense when I was a child, but I'm an adult now and responsible for my own choices, food purchases, preparation and eating habits. This is all true. Of course, it's not so simple. If things were as simple as fat bashers pretend they are, there wouldn't be an obesity problem

The problem for people who grew up as fat kids and are presently fat adults is that they can't simply put on the breaks of their lifestyle and biological condition up to this point and jam it into reverse. It's not only the psychological issues that are at play, but a lot of biological ones. Children who grow to adulthood overweight are essentially going to live their lives in a house with a poorly built foundation. No matter how many times they try to make improvements or patch things up, it'll never be as strong, resilient, or comfortable as a house which started out on a sound foundation.

For instance, the number of fat cells in your body cannot be changed once you reach a certain level of maturity. If you are thin upon maturing, you won't get more fat cells. If you're fat, you can't reduce the number unless you have surgery. The total number of fat cells affects how your body metabolizes and deals with food as well as affects hormone balances. Someone with more fat cells will have a propensity for storing fat more readily than someone with fewer. They also cannot change the disposition of their body's shape and size because the cells can only be shrunk or expanded, not eliminated (without lipsuction). This is why people have "problem areas" which they can exercise and exercise to improve but never get rid of. Those cells aren't going anywhere past a certain age.

What is more, estrogen, which is stored in fatty tissues has an effect on insulin and insulin resistance. More body fat will ultimately affect how you metabolize food and how fat is stored. Insulin resistance will ultimately affect appetite and how often you feel compelled to eat and what you want to eat.

I don't want to go into a bunch of biological mumbo jumbo as an "excuse" for fat people staying fat because I don't want to provide excuses. I want to talk about reasons. One of the reasons it's harder for a fat person to lose weight is that their body is different than a thin person's. They're fighting a much harder battle and that battle never ends because the "house" that their parents built for them isn't very sound and it's never going to be as sound as it could have been. Things that a thin person takes for granted, like the ability to resist an urge to eat a piece of cake, are a much harder task for a fat person. Imagine the difference between resisting an ice cold drink of water when you are parched and haven't had a drink for days as compared to doing so when you just have slightly dry mouth.

A fat person's body is always saying, "I'm parched", even when they're not. It is very hard not to give into the biological and psychological pressure to eat when that pressure is intense. Unless you grew up fat and are a fat adult, it's difficult to know just how tough it is to resist at times. Thin people aren't judging "willpower" from the same vantage point as a fat person. We've got a megaphone screaming "eat" at us and thin people just have a nagging whisper. One is a lot harder to brush aside than the other.

That isn't to say that megaphone can't be ignored, and one can condition oneself to do it (and it gets easier the more you do it), but just judging fat people and offering pat advice without considering the complexity of the problem is ignorant and pointless. Unless an enlightened attitude toward the problem starts to spread, it'll never get better. The solutions for a thin person who gains weight won't necessarily work for people with a lifetime of weight problems.