response 44 of 378:

Mar 5 15:34 UTC 2006

resp:39 - I would consider such a diet a success too!

resp:42 I think I will have to disagree with you. I think it is possible
for a person to be overweight and healthy. In fact, in my own family, my
severely obese grandmother has been healthy her whole life (until
recently) and is currently in her nineties. I think that when you get
into the over 100lbs catagory, there are some weight related health
risks but because diets fail so frequently, it causes more harm than
good to tell people to lose weight. It is better to recommend a healthy
diet and to encourage exercise. 

Here is an exerpt form Laura Fraser's book _Losing It_ where she talks
about a study done at Cornell.

"The health risks of being underweight haven't been calculated into any
of these equations... In a 1996 study, David Levitsky and his colleagues
at Cornell University analyzed 60 previous studies involving weight and
early deaths, involving 357,000 men and 249,000 women (many times more
than the Nurses' Health Study), and found that the health risks of
moderate obesity were exaggerated, whereas the risks of being
underweight have been neglected. For women, there was little
relationship between weight and early death at all. For men, after
controlling for confounding factors such as smoking and disease, the
data showed . . . those men who were very underweight were as likely to
die early as people who were seriously obese. For everyone between the
extremes, weight wasn't a substantial factor in their death. "The health
risks of being moderately underweight are comparable to that of being
quite overweight and look more serious than most people realize,"
Levitsky said."

Here is an exerpt from an article in The New England Journal of Medicine
written by Jerome P Kassirer, MD and Marcia Angell, MD.

"Given the enormous social pressure to lose weight, one might suppose
there is clear and overwhelming evidence of the risks of obesity and the
benefits of weight loss. Unfortunately, the data linking overweight and
death, as well as the data showing the beneficial effects of weight
loss, are limited, fragmentary, and often ambiguous."


I also do not necessarily think that every person who is overweight or
even severely overweight has an eating disorder at least not in the way
I think of eating disorders. I think anyone who eats when they are
hungry, eats reasonably healthy foods,  and who stops eating when they
are no longer hungry probably doesnt have an eating disorder. Of course
if one defines an eating disorder as having any eating habits that lead
to be one being fat than any fat person would have an eating disorder by
definition. 

However, I will grant you that it is probably pretty hard to find
someone who weighs over 300lbs who doesnt have some sort of messed up
ideas about eating. Partially because I doubt you can find anyone who is
that overweight who hasnt tried just about every diet in the universe.
And partially because of the way our culture treats obesity as a moral
issue. If a person is given the message that being fat is a moral
failing (and trust me, every fat person gets this message in one way or
another), and that no one who eats a healthy diet and who exercises can
possibly be fat, then every bite of food gets questioned and a person
might find they have food issues. 

resp:43 - I think there is a lot of room for improvement in my own diet.
But, my diet isnt totally bad. I eat a lot of fruit and veggies. I never
have been a big fan of pop and have recently pretty much cut it out of
my diet totally because I have decided not to eat high fructose corn
syrup. I did buy a pop imported from Mexico and made with sugar last
week though so it isnt that I dont drink it. On a typical day I will
have oatmeal for breakfast although twice a week, I have pancakes and
sausage. For lunch, I'll have something like baked chicken and a side of
veggies from the work cafeteria. Dinner is often pasta with garlic and
olive oil and maybe some parmesan cheese and a salad or something.
Sometimes I have toast and goat cheese and sliced fruit. I used to eat a
lot of processed food for dinner (i.e. frozen dinners) but I have been
getting away from that. I usually take an apple to work in case I get
hungry. I snack on fruit a lot and veggies less often. Sometimes I will
eat sweets in the evening. Not every day but often enough that I am
probably eating too much sugar.  Until I hurt my knee in January, I took
the dogs on a half hour - 45 minute walk 3 or 4 days a week which is
more exercise than a lot of thin people get but not exactly a huge
amount of exercise either. 

FWIW, I probably have an eating disorder although on the spectrum of
eating disorders, I would say that I have a mild case. I binge once or
twice a year, usually as a response to stress. I have found that I eat
on a schedule more than as a response to actual hunger. I respond to
external cues about when to stop eating (i.e. I clean my plate) . I did
get a book recently about eating disorders and I am following their plan
for overcoming it. I am not totally sure about all of their advice yet
but I have decided to give it six months. Even if I do happen to
normalize my relationship with food, I dont expect that I will lose much
weight.