WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
This is a new series, not quite related to the Turtle Diary series but in another sense, intimately related. And this is the introductory blog in a document I have decided to publish when completed, which is titled "Be Your Own Geneticist: Eliminating Overweight Against Medical Advice" - or something shorter, I'm working on it. Limp on whatever crippled limbs you have over the fold to what I discovered about the "mysterious obesity gene" and how geneticists and endocrinologists have already identified three of the genes for obesity but not even the doctors treating the conditions are treating it with the appropriate therapy.
First, a bit of housekeeping. People, we are losing weight. We are getting fit. We are offering answers, strategies and support. We are giving you data you pay thousands of dollars to so-called experts for - FOR FREE. We rule. So help us out and pitch in, and tell your story, tell us what you want, what you need, ask questions and post your hope of a better day in Obama's Africamerica.
October 10
Sat AM - ???
Sat PM - Edward Spurlock (Kessler, Ch. 13)
October 11
Sun AM - louisev - Turtle Diary
Sun PM - ???
October 12
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
October 13
Tues AM - ???
Tues AM - Clio2 (Kessler, Ch. 14)
October 14
Wed AM - ???
Wed PM - Edward Spurlock (special Geek My Fitness bicycling issue!)
October 15
Thurs AM - A DC Wonk
Thurs PM - ???
October 16
Fri AM - ???
Fri PM - ???
I am taking a while with this diary because it's "not my day" so to speak, and because I have multiple commitments to juggle for the weekend if I want to get anything resembling rest.
Introduction: Long Long Ago, In a Dimension Known as Childhood
I have written in my personal blog, and previously here, that I was a thin child. A very thin child. An anemic child, visibly, chronically underweight - but not for lack of eating. It was from excess of stress, and gruesome events that someone should have been locked up for long ago. But that is not the focus of this blog or of this book: suffice it to say, back in the early 1960's there were no social services, and despite regular attendance at church and Sunday school, my thinness and visible pallor were never questioned until I was ushered to the nurse one day in second grade, having wet myself in class after Miss Westcott refused to allow me to excuse myself to go to the toilet.
Me: 8 years old, in second grade: (picture has to get scanned)
The nurse examined me while she waited for my brother to return home by bicycle, a trip of a mile and a half, and get fresh clothes for me, because I had humiliated myself by wetting all over the floor in a huge puddle. Yes, this little trauma of early childhood is germane to the topic. You see, I was born to a registered nurse, and when she took one look at me, having given birth to two children prior, and having assisted in an unknown number of deliveries, she saw something she never told anyone about. And since she has gone the way of others of our kind, with a particular chromosomal abnormality affecting our adrenal glands, steroid production and electrolyte balances, she suffered a stroke from high blood pressure in her mid-70's and is now aphasic and cannot speak except with a vocabulary of a few dozen memorized words, nor can she write to confirm or deny my thesis based upon the regathered evidence.
What she never said about me, but which I know from my own knowledge, is that my primary sex characteristics were abnormal, on what they call the Prader Scale. Not abnormal enough, back in the days before DNA testing, to misassign me on my birth certificate as male, but abnormal enough that my mother knew she had better not say anything to them lest they probe further and find out I was deformed and mutilate me in the way they mutilate 3 out of every 100 female children whose genitalia are overlarge or lopsided or other so-called abnormalities that surgeons think they can "fix" with a scalpel. And believe it or not - I was one of the lucky ones. On that scale, I am somewhere between a Prader 1 and a Prader 2. Twenty years after my birth, many if not most females who are more virilized than Prader 2 would have undergone partial or extensive genital mutilation. And those who had a visible phallus at birth would be heralded into the world with "Congratulations Mrs. Smith, it's a boy." The shock would come later: at menarche. But boys don't get menarche.
The most obvious symptoms of the multiple-genetic disorders known as adrenal insufficiency, hyperandrogenism, or other adrenal cortex-related gene disorders, about which I am only beginning to learn, are everywhere around us: atypical body weight. By this I do not mean 'obesity.' Obesity is a technical term for a commonly-used rule of thumb by endocrinologists to mean the simplified "Body Mass Index" a simple calculation of height vs. weight, plotting it on a chart. No baseball player nor other athlete has a correspondence between their actual body mass and their healthy adult weight for a profession requiring heavy muscles. And neither do millions (yes, I said millions) of other people who had the luck (!) or misfortune (!!) to be born Italian, Hispanic, Ashkenazi, Turkish or Moroccan, in which it is estimated that 30% of all live births are nonclassical and 3 to 10 out of 100 are classical cases of adrenal disorders affecting body growth, fat and protein metabolism, and most importantly of all:, electrolyte balances controlling blood pressure, circulatory function, cell nutrition and immune system functions.
The United States, with a growing African American population (12% +), a very rapidly growing Hispanic population (30%+) and a stable population of Ashkenazi as well as well over a million Armenian Turks displaced by the 1917 genocide, and the largest overall Jewish population of any nation in the world (1.6 million in New York, over 1 million in California and half that many in Florida), proudly and ignominiously has the highest incidence of so-called obesity in the world, and we lead the pack of industrial nations in deaths from stroke, atherosclerosis, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and allergy. Yes, there is something unique about the most powerful nation on earth: we are the most ill. And our medical community, in its rather lackadaisical reliance on the research of others, their pursuit of money, academic and scientific recognition, sponsorship by industry and the invention of cures for disease along the allopathic model, are rushing to find the cause of what is considered to be - and falsely - the underlying 'lifestyle' cause of atypical overweight.
Overweight: is a symptom.
Hypertension is a symptom.
Stroke, heart disease, auto-immune disease, allergies - are all SYMPTOMS.
And our doctors are treating symptoms as if they were diseases that can be cured with a drug that causes the symptom to be suppressed, or disappear by forcing the body to stop attempting to find homeostasis through pituitary and adrenal manufacture of our endogenous hormones and blood chemistry. They are all interfering. They are keeping people from stroking out like my mother. But - WHAT ELSE ARE THEY DOING?
They are preventing the search for the underlying and related CAUSE, because once a CAUSE is found, then a cure can be pursued.
In my case, there may be some hope for removing the symptoms by treating and compensating for the underlying causes: and that is what this series of blog articles is about: digging into my causes, finding a nutritional and activity solution that works for me, and which can possibly be adapted by others in an experimental manner to unmask the symptoms and get to the root causes that end up being mis-treated and force us to seek our own counsel, ultimately, and doing that most unAmerican of activities: questioning the authority of medical professionals and seeking better information.