A little something to make you stop and think (Obesity)

Member Name: Coxy1974

Product:	Obesity
Date:	26/02/07 (233 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: There are none to being obese

Disadvantages: Other peoples attitudes, health problems

I’m not going to go into the medical facts – aside from the fact that everyone knows what obesity means I am not a doctor so feel it would be unfair to put all these facts in here. But I do want to give another slant on this and write about how it feels to be obese. I am writing this review from a very personal point of view.

I will start by saying that I am clinically obese. My Body Mass Index is 44. This puts me at a very high risk of heart disease. I only found this out this week because we have been having a health week at work. I got the opportunity to go to see a nurse FOC and have my blood pressure checked, height and weight checked, blood sugar done and my cholesterol checked.

What I found out is that my Cholesterol level is 3.2 (the lowest in the ideal bracket), my blood pressure is 110/55 and my blood sugar is 3.8 (again low in the ideal bracket). The nurse actually said that with readings like this she couldn’t understand how I was so overweight. She suggested I have my Thyroid checked to see if it was underactive. I told her that it had been checked and everything was normal as I had it checked last year after a referral from my GP as they, like her, were mystified as to why I hadn’t lost weight on the healthy eating plan I was following.

To me the answer is very simple. I am a certain body shape and I always will be. My weight fluctuates half a stone every month due to water retention. When I was weighed for this assessment I was due my period and this for me means mega water retention. Had I been weighed after my period then my BMI would have been lower.

I could have cried when I came out of the assessment. The nurses assessment of me was ‘Eat less and do some exercise.’ Yes she actually said that. I do yoga 3 times a week and swim 4 times a week. How much more do I need to do? I don’t have cellulite either as I don’t have many toxins, I drink 2 litres of water a day and follow a healthy eating plan. I’m not saying I’m a saint. I probably drink more alcohol than is good for me and I don’t cut out all sugary things and will eat that bar of Dairy Milk if it is shouting at me. Maybe if I cut these out then I would lose weight. I don’t feel unhealthy and I don’t suffer from being out of breath – in fact I am planning to take part in the 10k Race For Life this year having completed the 5k run last year and a 13 mile walk for GOSH in 2005.

I have spent lots of time on diets. One or another – the best for healthy eating is Weight Watchers Pure Points and I did manage to lose 2 stone. How did I do this? I didn’t drink anything but fresh fruit juice or water and ate nothing but salad, chicken and vegetables. I felt better, my skin looked excellent but then again I never actually get spots and I had more energy. So why did I stop? I got bored with eating what I was and felt deprived of things in the end.

Giving up alcohol was really hard for me as I do enjoy a drink – as friends will testify to when they’ve seen me drunkenly singing Wake me up before you go go into an empty champagne bottle before falling off the chair! I felt as though I couldn’t live my life without really living if you know what I mean. Also I didn’t lose any more weight beside the 2 stone. It didn’t matter what I did, stepping up the exercise, cutting out bread, cutting out the fruit juice – it just didn’t work. I had reached my particular plateau.

The women on my mum’s side of our family are all overweight to some degree. Some are a few pounds and others are grossly overweight. So how big am I actually? If I say I am a size 16 – 18 depending on where I shop do you still think that I am grossly overweight? Whichever way – that’s your opinion.

It has been proven that genetics have a lot to do with body shape and how big you are likely to be. As a child right up until I was about 19 I was a skinny wretch. I weighed six and a half stone and I looked awful. According to the nurse that visited work I should weigh around seven to seven and a half stone. This means I have over 4 stone to lose. How I will do this I have no idea. I have no time to do any more exercise and I am active in my job apart from hours spent in the car when travelling between sites but I compensate for that by the yoga and swimming – I also walk miles with my dog in the evenings that I am home.

I do not own a pair of scales as I don’t want to be obsessed by my weight but personally it upsets me when I am looked up and down when I go into a trendy shop by the shop assistant and immediately judged by my size.

When I say I am taking part in the walks, run etc that I have completed and hope to complete it is greeted with scepticism. As if people are thinking ‘She’s having me on’ or ‘She’ll never finish that’. Maybe that is me pushing my perception of myself onto others though and maybe I am being unfair and people aren’t thinking that at all.

I see all these super slim celebrities and do wish I could be slimmer. I think that Kelly Brooke is an ideal body shape being curvy but I am sure that someone has told her she needs to lose weight at some stage in her career.

I discussed this with my boyfriend and he says he loves me whether fat, thin, pink or green. It doesn’t matter to him because he loves ‘me’ and not an image I project. This made me cry because for years previous boyfriends asked me to lose weight for them because they were embarrassed in front of their friends because I was bigger than their girlfriends. Being totally honest I do have a bad body image. I look in the mirror when I am naked and wish really hard that my stomach was flatter (I do crunches every day to try to get it flatter) and that my thighs were slimmer. But I know it won’t happen.

One interesting fact that came out of my assessment with the nurse and it’s called an Astwell test. They measure you around your waist, just beneath your belly button. Mine was thirty one and a half inches. This apparently means that I am at the top end of the low risk for heart disease on the Astwell scale, which effectively looks at the distribution of weight around your body and is an alternative scale to the BMI which can sometimes be misleading.

Apparently if you carry your weight around the core area of your body (the stomach) then you are straining your heart than say someone who has a hourglass shape (such as mine) or someone who carries their weight lower in the body. I knew that at some stage in my life I would be extremely grateful for having a small waist and huge bum and boobs and now is that time.

Another fact that really made me angry – I have a fourteen year old niece. She is 5ft 7inches tall and has always been big for her age. She weighed in at a whopping 10.5lbs when she was born and my sister couldn’t produce enough milk to feed her so she’s always had a healthy appetite. She started to struggle with her weight when she became a teenager and since going on the pill to control her 3 week long periods, she’s been watching what she eats and been coming with me to walk my dog. She’s done really well and lost over a stone making her 10 stone. She looks healthily curvy – not overweight.

My sister took her to the doctors for her pill check up and the nurse weighed my niece. Instead of congratulating her on losing some weight she said to my sister ‘Your daughter needs to lose at least a stone and a half’ and then proceeded to call my sister a bad parent for not having a pair of scales in the house. All of this in front of my niece. Now this could have 1 of 3 effects on her. She could shrug and say ‘I’ve lost some, I’ll continue what I’m doing and stop when I feel healthy’ or she could take it too far and end up anorexic or she could comfort eat undoing all the good that she has already done. It is attitudes like this and a blatant disregard for individual shapes and sizes that makes people who are different feel a bit like lepers.

I am all for educating parents to make sure they stop feeding their children crap and sitting them in front of the television but there has to be a line, a happy medium or something to ensure a balance of the two.

The aim of my review is only to give a personal account of how it feels being obese and being judged on that and also the struggles I have faced to lose weight. Hopefully by having a healthy attitude towards eating and drinking and following a sensible exercise regime I will be able to lose weight.

I am sorry if others disagree with anything that is in my review but these are my very personal views on this subject.

I could go through the rest of my life not eating this and that because it will make me fat. The question is would I want to?

Summary: Just because we're big doesn't mean we are unhealthy