The Fat of the Land

Once you are ten pounds over your ideal weight each additional pound costs you a month of your life. Each pound slows you down, makes you less effective in personal encounters, and often lowers your self-image. Fat people are hospitalized more frequently than people of normal weight; they have more gallbladder problems, more surgical complications, more cases of breast cancer, more high blood pressure, heart attacks, and strokes. They also develop atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) at earlier ages. These facts are well-known.

It is less commonly known that the fat person cannot even eat much more than his or her thin counterpart. A day’s food represents about one pound of body weight: if you fast, on average you lose a pound a day; if you eat double, you gain a pound. Thus, if you gain ten pounds each year, you will be very fat, but this weight gain represents only an additional ten-days worth of food over the year, or approximately 3 percent. The fat person can eat only 1 to 5 percent more than a thin person.

We respect the difficulty of this problem, and we share these difficulties with you. But the solutions are personal, not medical. A few people have glandular illnesses that cause their weight problem, but for most of us the problem is not a medical one. As with the other habits that change health, management of the problem begins with its recognition as a problem. Weight control requires lifelong discipline and vigilance. It is not easy.

There are generally two phases to weight control: the weight reduction phases and the weight maintenance phase. The method you use to lose weight doesn’t matter too much (although liquid-protein diets are some what dangerous), and you can choose from any of a number of sound diets. Diets usually have a gimmick of some kind which encourages you and helps you remember the diet. Most people have some success with losing weight; if you se a target, tell people what you are trying to do, and stick with it for a while you can probably lose weight.

Weight Maintenance at your new weight is more difficult. Weigh yourself regularly and record the weight on a chart. Draw a red line at three pounds over your desired weight and maintain you weight below the line, using whatever method you need. Accept no excuses for increasing weight; it is easier and healthier to make frequent, small adjustments in what you eat than to try to counteract binges of overeating with dieting. Keep yourself off the roller coaster. You have to choose between calories and complications, early diet and early demise.