I Am Obese and It's All Our Fault

Last week witnessed a mini-flurry of internet stories which proclaimed that obesity is now "a lifestyle choice," or words to that effect. Apparently this is one of the premises (or at least the popular media think so) of the book The Fattening of America, by economist Eric Finkelstein. I haven't read it, don't know if I will, so I can't say anything about the book. But the threadbare spectre of blaming the ill for their disease once again confronted me as I scrolled through page after page of nutritionists and presumably thin folks piling on to fat people for being fat. The mothership of blame media, the NY Times, featured a glaring example.

If you are obese (and one third of you are according to the government), certainly you know the statistics. Certainly you have an idea of your cholesterol, your blood pressure, and the number of calories you consume each day. You certainly have a ballpark figure in mind when it comes to your weight. But what you also have, most certainly, is a significant amount of pain someplace inside that relates to your weight.

As America gets fatter, and the industrialized world along with us, we become more desparate, more fanatical about losing weight. The diet industry and big pharmaceuticals make billions of dollars from our pain. Our friends and family try to encourage us, and we do all that is expected, and more. We lose weight. We gain weight. We stay about the same. We eat, we starve, we fight, we negotiate. In the end, we give up. We give in to our culture, the money, the food, the stress, the pace, the overwhelming urge to eat what we want and just get on with life, for God's sakes. And we hurt.

And this hurt is what drives many of us to be obese. When we cannot find something to fill the place inside of us that longs to be filled, we eat. And when we eat, we eat what is available quickly and inexpensively. And then we hurt again. This cycle of pain-eat-pain drives many of us past despair to resignation. Yes, I am fat. Yes I will be fat, so what's the point in worrying about it. Here we see the "lifestyle choice" of obesity. It is more properly characterized as resignation to being fat and being in pain about it, because it is less painful to try to get on with life than to try again -- and fail -- to lose weight and become normal. Because we are abnormal. Abnormally fat. And this hurts a lot.

Last week I discovered that my body mass index (BMI) is now 40.1. According to the government, ADA, AHA, and all the other fat watchdogs, I am severely obese. Anything over a 40 BMI gets you that label. Anything over a 30 BMI is obese, for that matter. I have lost 109 pounds during the last 12 months (starting BMI 54.9, morbidly obese). I will need to lose another 76 pounds to be reclassified as overweight (BMI 29.9 or less). Then another 42 pounds to be "normal weight" (BMI <24.9). Such is the gauntlet of angst we obese must trudge to become normal.

These dietary gymnastics are intuitive to me. Put a chronic dieter, a bariatric physician, and a dietician in the same room and see who comes out on top of the food debate. Driven by the pain of obesity, lashed into a state of aggressive passive desperation, the obese chronic dieter can recite the nutritional content of any menu and discuss the latest New England Journal of Medicine article on the role of fat mobilizing molecules in obese rats. And along with all that knowledge, we have lived being fat. We know the deal. Solutions are fleeting as we become fatter and more resigned to being that way.

Under this lash of desperation I have found an approach that matches low-carbohydrate eating with an inner-directed search for love. Without struggling against my food, and without experiencing hunger, I have slowly, steadily lost weight and gained some understanding about the truth of my condition. The pain has diminished. I'm convinced that a spiritual solution is the only way I can stop using food as a substitute for love, or as a stop gap for my pain. It took me 20 years to understand and finally accept this way of living. But once I did, the results were immediate, effective, and long-lasting. For too long I saw the price of total surrender as being too high. And it is not without cost, especially at the outset when old ideas must surrender to new ones. When resignation turns to hope, and desperation turns to love, it's worth the cost at any price.