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You aren't kidding that sucks. As BryanC said in another thread, the problem is overconsumption. The cure is PREVENTION! Don't get that way in the first place!
What is truly amazing is that these people don't even really deserve the recognition for the significant loss. The surgery does.
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Okay, let me weigh in on this one, as a kind of devil's advocate. Yes, personal responsibility is in large measure the key to beneficial changes in our bodies and lifestyles (as well as deleterious changes). It's true that we are what we eat, and that we're also what we ate. If we weigh in at over 300 pounds, we are a whole lot of crap that we put away with enthusiasm over a long period of time.
I used to weigh over 200, at 5'8"-5.'9". I used to be a heavy smoker, around 4 packs a day. I put every pound on all by myself; I wasn't force fed like those French geese that produce fois gras. I lit every one of those cigarettes, except maybe those that a nice woman lit for me in cozy moments. I was responsible for my lifestyle, and I was in part responsible for improving it. I stopped smoking. I got my weight down to 160. I started real exercise, at long last, at 65. In September I weighed 165, which was okay because that extra 5 pounds is lean beef.
I just weighed myself this morning, with a certain dread. The scale told me the news --174 buck naked . I know where those 9 pounds came from, and I'm gonna get them off by 1 March, this time with the South Beach diet, albeit modified to include gin during the first two weeks.
But I still believe that the enormous increase in the incidence of obesity in North America is not entirely due to an increase in our individual and collective lack of will power and sense of responsibility for ourselves. There are social and cultural causes, as well.
Personal choices always are made against a background. I started smoking at age 14, back in 1949. Smoking was "grown up." My parents both smoked. My uncles. My aunts. The air was full of blue smoke--and full of slogans. "LSMFT"=Lucky Strikes Mean Fine Tobacco. There isn't a cough in a carload. I'd walk a mile for a Camel. Blow a little smoke my way. At my university little packs of four cigarettes were handed out free, and they were abundant, but most of us still bought ciggies, at 18 cents a pack.
Today's NY Times had an article about the Amish in Pennsylvania. Some Amish are overweight, but true obesity is virtually unknown. The reasons are obvious. These citizens aren't sitting around watching TV and stuffing themselves with pizza and the horrors in the form of highly processed food from the middle aisles of the typical Safeway or Acme. They're not driving cars to go where they could walk in under 10 minutes.
There's more than enough blame to go around. We can blame school boards that try to keep reasonable expenses down by selling "pouring rights" for soft drink machines in halls and cafeterias. We can also blame those same school boards for failure to insist on effective programs of physical activities, preferably in life sports, as part of the curriculum. We can knock food companies that tout their wares as low-fat, hoping that no one will read the labels--the labels that you can bet your last nickle they wouldn't put on their stuff if it weren't required by law)--and find out that the things they sell are loaded with high fructose corn syrup, calories, and non-nutritive ingredients. We can also point a finger at national politicians who provide outrageous subsidies to agribusiness and to large-scale industrial farmers in the Midwest.
When I go to the grocery store, what really makes me want to scream is the long, long aisle devoted to cereals. A handful of brands are fine. Oatmeal, but not the instant stuff. Kashi. My own favorite lately is Müeslix, despite the superfluous umlaut on the "u." It's pretty good stuff, particularly with added ingredients--half a handful of frozen blueberries, a tablespoon of bran, and another tbsp of wheat germ. But almost everything else is a horror. We would do well to go back to the cereals that were available back in, say, 1960, when there were probably no more than 20. Ditch the ones with chocolate. The ones with leprechauns or elves on the package. The ones with ...well, you name it, all the seductive features that are supposed to make the 3-year old tagging along next to the grocery cart have a t antrum to acquire.
And as regards gastric bypass, maybe a little compassion is in order. The two brothers who used to live next door when they were growing up were very different, despite the same home environment. One was slender and athletic, the other on the pudgy side. They're in their 40s now. The slender one has thickened up a bit, but he isn't really obese. They other one yoyoed back and forth between 275 and 375 for a couple of decades. He had the surgery last spring--and it was a personal decision, a last resort on the part of someone who realized his life was in jeopardy. I saw him the other day, and he looks great.
Why did he let himself become so obese? Maybe his parents told both their kids to clean their plates, and he was the one who listened and obeyed.
Yeah, as JP wrote so eloquently many moons ago on the MH board, I am SAD and DISGUSTED at what I see waddling up the aisles at the grocery store...and at the unhealthy crap piled high in their shopping carts. I agree about our overconsumption. But overconsumption has a complex set of intersecting causes. In my own household, one cause is a tacit, unexamined belief that once the autumn harvest is stored away in the barn, it's time for us to reward ourselves with cookies, and pies, and great snowy piles of steaming mashed potatoes swimming in butter and sour cream, and bottles of port and madeira....
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