[Serious] Tired

[Abaddon_ire]

The mindset is an essential component. My mother was obese. No matter what the diet, she lost no weight. She would report in exactly what she had for breakfast, lunch and dinner and tot that up she would have been in the starvation category. Yet still lost no weight.

It turns out that the time between meals was not being counted. Add in a bite of this and a taste of that all day long and boy it was no wonder that no weight was lost at all. 

She was functionally blind to all of that daily grazing. They weren't meals so they didn't count.

The scary part is that my father and my three siblings and I were equally blind to it. Looking back, I find myself wondering "How did we miss that?" and the answer is  that we didn't miss it at all. It was simply normalised. Family dynamics are a bugger. We were all enablers.

Eventually, we did take action but it was far too late. The only thing that changed her behaviour was diabetes and two massive heart attacks. 

Time for an emergency quad bypass. And a combo pacemaker/defib device

After months of rehab, on her release from hospital, the med team told her out straight. "We have bought you ten more years". So what did she do? She travelled the world and became a speaker at symposiums for fellow sufferers and basically stuffed as much living into those ten years as humanly possible and never went back to old habits. I cannot but admire that.

But that is what it took for a behavioural change.

Yes, grazing is still an issue I have from time to time.  I watch my meals, eat light and healthy, but if I'm not careful, I'll pile on the calories getting an odd piece of lunch meat or a couple of little crackers or some extra milk with my breakfast.  Grazing adds up, big time.  

And, yeah, you need the right inspiration.  For a long time, I didn't have that.  You want to know who's going to be really inspired to lose weight?  A 350 pound tranny who suddenly found herself with a job that makes surgery possible.  At least that's what it took for me; I knew surgeons wouldn't touch me at 350 so I started working my ass off (literally) and I'm now down to 213 lbs and surgery is just 10 days away (btw, doctor wanted me to be at least 220, but I want to get my weight even lower than that before surgery).  Find the right inspiration and you can overcome anything.

Well done, keep going.

I suspect that one of the problems is how people percieve it as entirely self centred wanton gluttony that the person could simply stop.  It is never that simple, ever. There are a crapton of diverse reasons why it is so and no two cases are identical. We are handicapped by evolution which cursed us with a desire to eat whatever is available because who knew where the next meal was going to be found? Then there is a genetic component. Add in metabolism, cultural bias, circumstance, economic position, upbringing, psychology and so forth, well, there clearly is no simple single answer. There just is no one size fits all solution.

That makes dealing with the issue really difficult. But it also makes fat-shaming really easy.