Call this whining if you will, but I feel justified in making this simple observation:
You can tweak diet and exercise, vitamins and drugs, all you like, but in the final analysis, the only way to lose weight is to eat less food than it takes to sustain life. A controlled form of starvation. And this is painful.
That's just how it is. It's unpleasant, especially if you have dicey blood sugar.
That's life.
3 comments:
I have a surefire method of healthy weight loss. Become a subsistence farmer. If you're really committed to losing weight, this is the way to go.
The two most seriously obese people I ever knew (one is dead now) had identical experiences - they were raised in rural areas, where they chucked around hay bales and ate whatever they wanted. When they took up more sedentary occupations in town, they did not adjust their diets to fit, and ballooned accordingly.
I've mostly stopped worrying about it. I probably weigh more than I should, but since I went vegetarian this seems to have been countered by the benefits of my increased intake of fresh foods. At any rate, I'm healthier than I ever was, and that's what counts. Despite a certain reduction in proteins consumed, my hypoglycemia is stable most of the time these days.
Americans are however getting shorter for the first time since European immigration began. The cause would seem to be the heavy diet of junk food.
This is Peni, weird blood sugar effects since 1961
Peni, your comments tie in well with a article I just read in the November 2004 issue of _Analog_, which suggests that obesity is the result of hunter-gatherer instincts being applied to an agricultural setting. Some people, with ancestors from the Fertile Crescent, have already developed instincts that allow a food surprlus to remain in the granary rather than insisting on turning it into fat, while others (notably Pacific Islanders and Pima Indians) have suffered disastrous obesity outbreaks as soon as they were exposed to mass-produced food.
I am not concerned about appearance (well, maybe a little), but heart disease (you know, the kind my father nearly died from last year) and diabetes bother me.
So, I shall continue to suffer awhile longer, until this hormone-spewing invader on my belly is beaten down, and I'll try not to whine too much.
Sure am going through my migraine medication at a clip, though. . . .
Actually, it's not anything as controllable as instincts - at least not in the case of the Pimas. Research on this is being done on right here in San Antonio and there was an article in my last Mammoth Trumpet, the newsletter of the Center for the Study of the First Americans. Certain North American tribes - including the ancestors of the modern "Mexican" population, who are doing their bit to make San Antonio the most obese city in the U.S. - got hold of a mutation which allowed them to burn fat more slowly than normal. In a hunter gatherer and even in a subsistence farming/ranching lifeway, this was an advantage, and the fantastic accomplishments of southwestern tribes in marathon running and other endurance trials may be partly attributed to it. Unfortunately, once you get on a diet of government cheese, the beneficial mutation becomes deadly. Atkins is a terrible idea for these people. Approaches to dealing with it include training children (and in particular training mothers to offer to their children) a more traditional native diet and encouraging less sedentism. We know how well that's worked with white populations, but middle class white folks don't, for the most part, have diabetic amputees living in our homes, and many endangered tribal children do.
P
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