Today, in America, we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Obesity has been conclusively linked to a host of severe health problems, and as the obesity rates in this country rise there will in time be a subsequent increase in those health problems. For me, this is not an intangible story about statistics, data, and nebulous percentages of adults. For me, this is a very real and personal crisis.
My father struggled with obesity until the day it killed him. He was never under 300 pounds as long as my memories of him go, and at his heaviest he was over 600 pounds. He pleaded with me before he died not to wind up like him.
At the time I started writing this, I weighed 355 pounds. I have been over 300 pounds for several years now. I am at the same age my father was when he first went over 300 pounds and never went back under it. I am at a critical crossroads in my life, and I intend to choose the right path.
Typically we ascribe obesity as a moral failing: a fat person, like me, is blamed for being fat because they don’t have self control. They choose to continue a self-destructive habit because they lack the willpower to make the right choices for their own health. This stigmatization leaves obese people as one of the last safe targets for mockery and ostracizing, all over the world. From Japanese companies monitoring employee weight and then badgering the employees for being oversized, to charging people more for airfare based on their weight, to good old fashioned insults and mockery (I’m not providing a link, any of you who read the comments on pretty much ANY diary involving Donald Trump over the past 4 years saw plenty of comments insulting him for being fat, rather than or in addition to being a bigoted rapist who committed human rights atrocities), it’s considered perfectly acceptable to punish fat people for being fat. The underlying assumption is we deserve it, it’s our fault we’re fat, so if we don’t like being shamed for it we should put down the fork and lose some weight already.
To be completely frank: it’s all bullshit. Diet and exercise are not enough to keep weight in line. Don’t take my word for it: people are fatter now than they were in the 80’s even if they ate the same number of calories and kept to the same exercise regimen.
The article there poses a lot of hypotheses for why people are fatter today: increased prescribing of SSRI’s, chemicals in our environment messing up our hormones, to a mysterious change in gut flora (as recent studies have shown what a massive impact gut flora can have on our bodies and minds). However, there’s one critical factor they’re missing: Sugar.
Sugar is the Millennial’s tobacco product: a dangerous, highly addictive substance (8x more so than cocaine) that is ubiquitous in American culture and considered harmless by almost everyone despite its proven links to deadly conditions. I honestly couldn’t settle on just one link about sugar’s danger in the previous sentence: doing a search for “sugar linked to” in google brings up a host of auto-completions like “obesity”, “cancer”, “heart disease”, each of which brings up numerous articles from well-respected sources on the dangers of sugar consumption.
It’s also like tobacco in another way, it has a massive and powerful industry defending it to the death. Lobbyist groups like the American Beverage Association have a massive vested interest in perpetuating the lie that it’s not sugar making people fat, it’s fat people making bad decisions.
Going into detail about the links between sugar and obesity, and the deviousness of our nation’s food and beverage industries, would take up far too much space for a single diary. Fortunately, losing 170 pounds also takes much longer than one day. Over the course of the next...well, however long it takes, I invite you to follow me on my journey to lose weight, and learn more about the insidious nature of the 21st century’s Phillip Morris.
Starting this Tuesday, May 4th, I’ll be posting a weekly update on my weight loss efforts along with another informative article about sugar, obesity, and the skullduggery of groups like the ABA. I believe that if we can raise awareness about this underappreciated danger in American society, we can fight back just as we did once before against tobacco products.
P.S. — At the start of this diary, I mentioned that when I first started writing it, I weighed 355 pounds. After two weeks I’ve already lost 10 pounds, with my third weekly weigh-in tomorrow. The biggest change to my diet? I’ve cut out all sugars and zero-calorie sweeteners (more about them in future diaries).
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