... Then Just Stay Fat. (3 page)

We have all kinds of ways of painting a picture we can live with (denial
ain’t
just a river in Egypt).
The problem is the scale won’t comply; it won’t
play along with our charades.
And since it won’t lie, we are forced to t
ake its answer and contort it.
We do everything within our power to maintain our comfortable fantasy, an
d we are extremely good at it.
We reframe the answer (my whole family is big), dismi
ss the answer (I’m really fit
and I eat healthy), or ignore the answer (you can weigh me
,
but I don’t want to see it).

None of that is g
etting us where we need to be. White
washing a problem doesn’t make it go away, and being obese is a problem, I don’
t care what color we paint it.
Before you get all u
p in arms, I’m talking health.
Aesthetics and body image aside, o
besity will impact our health.
Anyone who says it won’t is a liar (or at least severely misinformed).

Let’s get it
all straight
so ther
e’s no wiggle room any longer.
A BMI of 18.5-24.9 currently
is
accepted as a healthy targ
et for the general population.
Y
es, pro football players with 5 percent body fat and 200 pounds
of muscle don’t fit the index, but that’s not us, now is
it?
And all those claims to big bones and large frames are accounted for in the weight ranges (there’s a high end and a low end).

Regarding fit or fat, of course it’s great to be fit at
any weight, but define “fit.”
Weight or body fat usually falls into the definition, and even if you disregard it as part of a “fitness definition,” I’m a monkey’s uncle if you are
gonna
sit there and convince me you can be considered health
y when you are morbidly obese.
No way.

If your
coping mechanism to date has been to ignore
your weight, don’t feel badly. You’re in good company.
I’ve done my share of standing on the doctor’s scale backwards, cringing as the nurse scribbled on the clipboard, anxious when the doctor ca
me in glancing over my record.
I scrutinized his face
for any semblance of judgment.
W
hether or not I faced the scale
or the doctor skipped a pep talk,
it didn’t change the truth
and it still pervaded eve
ry hour of my waking thoughts.
I knew what I needed to do and
just agonizingly prolonged it.
What about you?

We want our lies to be
true – desperately.
We think
it means less work, less pain.
But aren’t we experiencing work and pai
n every day when we are obese?
We don’t esc
ape it, we just reallocate it,
attach it to different problems.

The sooner we
face the numbers and start to deal with them, t
he sooner we can resolve them. No more equivocating.
Embrace the
numbers,
see them for what they are –
a measurement,
a point in time, part of the process,
no
t an accusation
—
and move on
. Love ‘
em
or hate ‘
em
,
they’re trying to tell us something.

References:

http://
www.exrx.net/Calculators/BMI.html

R
ecent headline news (by 2030, 42 percent
of Americans will be obese) reminded me of sage advice Neal Spruce,
the
founder and
CEO of dotFIT, a
nationally-renowned
fitness and nutrition
company
(dotfit.com)
, once shared with me:
“Don’t get fat in the first place – it’s way easier to
prevent gain than reverse it.”
At first, it just sounded like a
catchy T-shirt or gym poster.
But the more I thought, the deeper I saw the implication of what he was trying to share.

Most of us gain weight by allowing 10 poun
ds a year to creep up.
That’s abo
ut one measly pound per month.
I don’t know about yo
u, but I don’t notice a pound.
Spread that out over my whole body
and it’s not even perceptible.
Layer on top
my God-given talent for denial
and I have a recipe for long-term obesit
y, one measly pound at a time.
And Neal is right, it is super hard to reverse it because it’s so stinking easy to pack it on – lava cakes, here a snack there a s
nack, and some deep fried joy.
Heck, let me crank up the denial center in my brain and I can gain weight on things I call “salads” (where lettuce becomes a delivery vehicle for creamy ranch dressing loaded with cheese sprinkles and crunchy bread cubes… oh
,
and some bacon).

When most of us read cautio
nary health statements like “42 percent
of us are headed for obesity,” we might pause, but most likely just give it
a cursory glance and move on.
We honestly don’t believe they are talking to us (as we nosh on a mega-scone feeling intellectual b
ecause it’s in the presence of East C
oast newspaper
s).
They must be talking about those other people, the ones shopping from their scooter chairs – the poor souls.

No they aren’t.
They are talking to you and
me – highbrow coffee and all.
Allow
me to prove my painful point.
How many different size pants
are in your closet?
Can you st
ill fit in your wedding dress?
Your Army uniform?
What
did you weigh 20 years ago? Ten years ago?
This morning?
Do you see a trend you’d rather not discuss (and no, you don’t get to lay c
laim to youthful metabolisms)?
L
et’s really scare ourselves.
Plot that info on some graph paper and see what poundage the line pr
edicts in another 10-20 years.
Eek!

I’ve worked with lots of people at varying places on the “health and fitness spectrum” – people who need to drop 5-10 pounds and just get back into the swing of
things, and people who are 100-plus pounds
in the hole, who can’t walk a block without a break, and who see their “healthy place” as a
miniscule light at the en
d of an extremely long tunnel.
What Neal Spruce is trying to
tell us is absolutely true.
The further a person gets from his healthy weight, the harder it becomes to return,
and I mean hard – stupid hard. We aren’t talking a 10-
minute walk eac
h day and snacking on carrots.
To lose that weight will take an entire life overhaul that impacts your family, your friends, how you entertain, your definition of socializing, how you shop, where you spend your time, how much TV you watch, how you cook, where you eat, how often you are standing… pick a topic.  It is h-a-r-d.

Look at it this way… we’ve all seen those reality TV shows about hoarders – people living with an unbelievable amount of “stuff” (some of it none of us
would consider worth keeping).
The amount of work to clean
it up is almost unfathomable.
It’s difficult to think a person allowed hi
s home to get to “that point.” Yet
I assure you it developed one “thing” at a time, an ite
m here and then an item there.
Skipped cleaning the house one da
y, then another, then another.
The ho
use didn’t become filled to the
rafters overnight – it took years of repeatedly deciding to not get rid of th
is and not get up to
do that
.
The same process happens with weight
gain to the point of obesity.
One pound here and one pound there – repeatedly choosing to hand wave past bigger clothes and a
doctor wag
ging
her finger at us. One hundred pounds is not gained overnight.
It’s gained one measly pound at a time to the point of “holy Moses, what’s that speck of light at the end of that long tunnel?”

For those of us 10, 20, even 50 pounds from our healthy weight, I implor
e you to make that U-turn now
—
n
ot tom
orrow, not next week, but now.
What looks hard today will be “tiny light at the end of th
e tunnel” hard in a few years.
And those years are coming –
2030 is barreling down on us. Do w
e
w
anna
be in that 42 percent
or o
n the other side of the stats?
“Don’t get fat in the first place – it’s way easier to prevent gain than reverse it.” 

References:

United States. Centers for Disease
Control .
CDC Weight of the Nation Press Briefing
.
Atlanta: Centers for disease control, 2012.
Web.
<
http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2012/t0507_weight_nation.html
>.

If I’m ever caught behind enemy lines and they are trying to
torture information out of me, there’s one sure
f
ire way to make me give it up:
start reciting the wo
es of “starvation mode” to me. Well-educated
TV health gurus toss it around, fitness professionals warn of it, and h
eavy folks use it as a crutch.
I
almost don’t know what to do with myself when a morbidly obese person, asking for help, bemoans they’ve “whacked their metabolism” with starvation and that
’s why they can’t lose weight.
Seriously?

I’ve taken a run at this mountain befo
re and
,
since I’m stubborn
, I’m going to try yet again to set the
record straight on this topic.
I’d like to address
two separate groups of folks:
healthcare professionals (particularly in the media) including trainers, and people who are looking to improve their health via weight loss – aka, regular folks.

Healthcare
p
rofessionals
:
I know you mean well when you cite research on “starvation mode” and I grant you there are studies with meaningful statistics on lowered basal metabolic rates following prolonged periods of sever
e
caloric restriction, but these findings are small when compared to the caloric deficits necessary to turn arou
nd a morbidly obese lifestyle.

A study frequently cited
is the Biosphere 2 Study in which
caloric expenditure was included for research after they realized there wasn’t enough food in the sphere and the eight peeps locked up inside
were forced to eat less.
Yes, the
Biospherians
lost weight and yes, their daily energy expenditure was about 180 kcals less than their control group (not them as their own control, mind you, since they didn’t know to get the baseline data headed into the
sphere).
Of the 180 kcals difference between the
basal metabolic rate (
BMR
)
of the two groups, about 60 was attributed to a decrease in body mass and another 65 was attributed to a decrease in non-volitio
nal activity (aka, fidgeting).
The remainder was categorized as statistic
ally insignificant. So
after the dust settles on the data, only
65 kcals per day is what weight-
management
science would find intriguing.
And frankly, 65 kcal compared to the 5,000-10,000 per day a morbidly obese person consumes is a joke.

Also, be mind
ful of “fat ears.”
I’m confident many of yo
ur patients/clients have them.
Anyone who has struggled with weight likely listens through a filter, not unlike optimists a
nd their rose-colored glasses.
What scientists and healthcare professionals find intellectually intriguing and useful in a scientific body of
knowledge,
heavy people hear as “uh
, oh, you better watch out!
If I don’t
eat enough, I’ll gain weight!” No lie.
You say “starvation
mode” and that’s what we hear:
eat more.