The Hard Truths

In the last article I wrote that “simple is seldom the same thing as easy.” I guess I should point out the obvious: losing weight is hard. And even worse, the consequences of failure are very high. According to the Surgeon General's website, the risks include death, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, breathing problems, arthritis, reproductive problems, and many other health problems. This is the Sword of Damocles that everyone who is overweight is faced with.

Besides the severe physical problems listed above, being overweight can result in psychological and emotional damage. It's not any secret that people who are overweight are discriminated against and made fun of. A search on Google on the keyword “fat jokes” results in 1.7 million hits. Searches on the keywords “ethnic jokes” or “blonde jokes” don't return nearly as many pages, which is an unscientific indicator of just how much derision is directed at people who are overweight.

Should someone who is overweight lose weight to please others or to escape discrimination? I don't think so, rather, I think that the only good reasons for losing weight are internal, rather than external. A person should want to lose weight for health and happiness, not because other people make fun of them. Nevertheless, it's a reality of life that overweight people have to deal with derision every day, and as a result some have formed “fat pride” groups. These types of associations aren't new. Pride groups have a long history, and fill a valuable role in protecting people against hostility.

So, being overweight is hard. There are severe health consequences to being overweight. An overweight person has to put up with the scorn of society, and somehow maintain their mental health and self-esteem in the face of that. The bad news is that losing weight is hard too; most people who start diets abandon them quickly, and those who manage to lose weight gain it all back after their diet is done. Millions of people are on a cycle of losing and gaining weight, and that cycle lasts their entire lives. If a comparison can be imagined where the physical and emotional consequences of being overweight (which includes death) are balanced against the difficulty of losing weight, then the judgement is obvious. As much as people want to live longer, feel better, and avoid death, that desire is not greater than the difficulty they face when they try to lose the pounds.

When I first started to learn about losing weight, the statistics were looking pretty bleak. Even as I reflected on my own experiences with friends and family who had tried to lose weight, I realized that I didn't know anyone who had been overweight, but had successfully lost their weight and kept it off permanently. Not a single person! Even worse, they hadn't even been able to keep their weight stable. Over the years, they slowly expanded, and the little belly turned into a big belly, and heaviness turned into obesity. That was the path I was on.

Not everything was doom and gloom though. There was a little silver lining on all those clouds. Many of the health consequenses of weighing too much were dependent on a person's weight. In other words, a person who was just a little bit too heavy would have a much lower risk of developing arthritis than someone who was very heavy. The Surgeon General's website says that for every two pounds of extra weight, the risk of developing arthritis increases by 9%-13%. Diabetes shows a similar relationship between weight and increased risks. If you just look at the numbers, they certainly look impressive. A lot of work has been done by a lot of researchers to dig out these links between weight and health risks. But, it can be a bit difficult to see what these numbers mean to a regular person. The trick is to turn the question around on itself. Instead of asking “how much does risk increase for every pound of weight?”, it can be more useful to ask the question “when weight comes down by a pound, what are the benefits?”

The answers can be very surprising, because the risks pile on like compound interest. When a modestly overweight person loses a few pounds, the actual amount of risk avoided is also very low. But when a very heavy person loses even a small amount of weight, the amount of risk avoided is very high. Ten percent of a heavy person's risk for a heart attack is much larger than ten percent of a thin person's risk for a heart attack, and reducing the risk of a heart attack will also lead to a corresponding decrease in actual heart attacks. A dramatic instance of this effect was uncovered by a study called the Diabetes Prevention Program, which found that their group which lost a modest 5%-7% of their weight reduced the incidence (the total number of cases) of diabetes in the group by 58%!

This knowledge is valuable because it shows clearly that losing even a few pounds can yield great benefits. Not many people who weight 280 pounds would ever expect to reduce their weight to what it was when they graduated from high school. But dropping 30 pounds is certainly possible, and could drastically cut the risks of many diseases or sudden death. It's the natural conclusion of understanding all the “hard truths” of being overweight. If losing 100 pounds has proven to be unrealistic in past, then it's the justification for making an effort to lose just 20 pounds in the future. Next article, I'll show why losing 20 pounds is easier than falling off a bicycle.