mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

Even though the whole philosophy of disease-ifying weight continues to bug me, I confess to being intrugued by this kind of research. As I had already started to surmise as just a Scientific American level layperson, this research demonstrates that the body's genetic regulatory systems are not just a simple set of on/off switches, but an incredibly complex system rife with multiple feedback loops, redundancies, and ohter complexities. So when you're talking about the impact of high levels of body fat on overall health, it's only to be expected that there are numerous different command-and-control gene networks involved in mediating that impact. Which would suggest  why most current medical solutions for obseity, which typically tend to intervene at just one point in what turns out to be a complex cascade of biochemical events, tend to backfire in all the ways that they do--it's like pulling just one pickup stick out of a whole pile and not anticipating that the rest of the pile won't shift around or even come tumbling down.

As I read between the lines of this article, I also note more evidence for the fact that adipose tissue is not just an inert "container" for body fat, but living tissue like any other bodily tissue, with its own unique genetically-supervised functions, including feedback loops that influence other tissues of the body.

I've also learned, from long experience of reading these kinds of articles in mass media, that things can often get oversimplified. So I went and looked up the abstracts of the original scientific research papers on which this article is based. At least to judge from the abstracts, the NBC article seems to be more-or-less on track--though unfortunately one can't see the full texts without shelling out bucks. But if you want to check out the abstracts, you can go here and here.

Sigh--the diet pundits have re-discovered carbs

Link: Why carbs are the new diet craze - Health - MSNBC.com.

Oh, I just love it when the diet industry pundits suddenly "discover" a nutrient that's been there all along. But apparently, at least according to this Wikipedia article, resistant starch is a legitimate nutritional entity, a category of starch distinct from both soluble and insoluble fiber, which plays its own role in keeping one's system regular and one's appetite sated. Interestingly, I've always enjoyed my bananas on the green side, and don't mind eating cold leftover potatoes as a snack, never dreaming that these foods are apparently rich in this so-called resistant starch. Who knew? I guess my bod had been intuitively zeroing in on this type of starch all on its own, without the pundits to guide me.

Weekly weigh-in: still plateauing

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.3 lb

Still on that plateau ... steady as she goes ...

Oh yeah--forgot about the cane!

I was hobnobbing with folks during coffee hour after services at my hippy-groovy Unitarian Universalist church this morning when one of my fellow church members flags me down and asks: "Hey, so you're totally doing without your cane now? How is that happening?"

Heh. I almost forgot that people who know me are still catching up with the fact that I'm not using a cane much anymore. I still keep it in the car, because sometimes at the end of a day of shopping or whatever, the muscles around my left knee get fatigued and need a little support. And sometimes I use it the day after I've overdone things and the knee is letting me know it feels a bit unstable.

But otherwise I'm pretty much free of it. And the more I walk around without it, the more my endurance increases, as well as the strength of those key muscles around the knee that keep the joint aligned and supported.

The little meniscus tear is still in there, and still occasionally starts clicking and attempting to lock the knee. But it's doing it less and less. I can't help thinking that the way I was walking with the cane, which inevitably throws one's body out of alignment, was exacerbating the meniscus tear. Now that I'm using the cane less and less, my body and thus my knee are in more normal alignment, so it's plausible that this is putting less stress on that little wedge of cartilege in there so that it doesn't get all irritated and inflamed as often.

It's too easy for me to take this change for granted, but it really is a big huge deal--and it's a direct consequence of having taken off all that weight that was slowly but surely pulverizing that knee to bits. So--hurray for me! And hurray for friends who spontaneously notice such things! Hey, I'm not proud, I'll happily take all the ego-strokes I can get.

Weekly weigh-in: plateau? bottom? And whither this blog?

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.32 lb

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I've been plateaued at 192 pounds for about a month now. You'll also remember that I had vowed I was going to let my weight find its own natural stopping point, without doing any extraordinary alterations to my routine to force my weight lower.

So I'm wondering now: is this it? Have I reached my body's natural preferred stopping point? Not that I'd be changing my current routine one whit, any more than I planned to change it if I weren't at bottom. In fact, this may well be a moot point from a practical standpoint--I've got a healthy routine, it's working for me, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.

It does, however, make me wonder what I should do with this blog from this point forward. After all, it's no more exciting for me to keep entering essentially the same data week after week than it must be for you folks out there to read it! And the truth be known, I pretty much laid out the bulk of my philosophy about healthy weigh management--and vented the bulk of my angst about the dieting industry--in these first two years of blogging.

So I'm considering expanding the focus of this blog, from a personal weight-management journal to a more wide-ranging blog about my interests in food. This would of course still include my weigh management routine--after all, I'm not going to stop any of my disciplines just because I'm changing the blog's focus. And if something should change about my weight management routine, of course you'll hear about it here right off. And I have occasionally mentioned my other food interests here from time to time. I'd just be bringing those other interests more into the foreground.

I'm not sure exactly how and when these changes will start showing up on this blog, but watch this space, and sooner or later all will be revealed.

Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com

Link: Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com.

I confess I had been getting increasingly irked at the strain of innuendo among certain health pundits to the effect of "those awful inconsiderate fat people, costing the rest of us so much in inflated insurance and medical costs because of their unhealthy lifestyles." But, as one person is quoted in this article, this study “throws a bucket of cold water” onto that whole line of fear-mongering: statistically, thin healthy people actually cost the system more over their lifetimes than fat people.

Of course I don't want heavier people given short shrift in any way when seeking real, useful medical help for their health issues. But, again as the article says, I'd like to see that help offered for the right reasons--not because of some blame-the-victim mythology about how many healthcare dollars society erroneously believes fat people are "wasting".

But I also think the article doesn't go quite far enough. I'm willing to speculate that the cost differences uncovered by this study may well have been known all along by the health care industry. Hell, those insurance companies do their managed-care cost savings analyses on every little thing these days; so I find it hard to believe that it's escaped their attention that long-lived healthy people generate more revenue for them than obese people.

I can't help thinking: if I were a Machiavellian health-care bean-counter, aware that fat people aren't costing the system/bringing in as much revenue as thin people, how would I suggest the company take advantage of that disparity? Would I recommend to my bosses that "curing" fat people be less of a priority because they don't earn the company as much (which is how they used to treat us)? Or perhaps that the company participate in this new-fangled War on Obesity, diseasifying fat and coming up with costly new "treatments" so that it contributes more to their bottom line (which is this brave new world of super-expensive bariatric surgeries and medically-supervised fasts)?

Thnk that's overly cynical? Well, considering such health-insurance practices as taking claims for major--and expensive--health care crises as a cue to find any flimsy excuse to cancel the claimant's policy so the comapny doesn't have to pay up, thus dooming the claimant to medical and/or financial disaster, I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to imagine other egregious ethics violations on the part of this industry. There's just been too many examples of the bottom line trumping patient needs to leave me anything other than cynical.

Genes that beat cold blamed for obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Genes that beat cold blamed for obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

I have long joked about my physical build being the result of evolutionary impacts on my Eastern European Jewish ancestors--my people self-selected, so I quip, for the genetic traits of being squat and low-slung, all the better to avoid being blown off the Russian steppes by the wintry winds while digging potatoes out of the frozen ground.

Now obviously evolutionary selection doesn't work over quite that short a timeframe (i.e. mere centuries), but it always seemed plausible to me that it was indeed influencing our species shape over the long-term--and here is a report of a study implying exactly that.

Nevermind that the story misses the full implications of this point by still referring to obesity as a "disease"--nope, folks, your own study is implying that obesity is simply another evolutionary adaptation, like the massive amounts of fat carried by polar bears to survive in their native habitat. The fact that our environment has changed such that our evolutionary adaptations are now backfiring on us does make it a health problem, but disease-ifying a natural variation in human physiognomy is not helping the heads of people trying to cope with that variation one bit.

(In fact, it smacks of similar language I've seen used by certain plastic surgeons, who define small breast size in women as a "disease" for which breast augmentation surgery is the "cure".)

Weekly weigh-in: back to the latest plateau

These are officially yesterday's numbers:

• Yesterday's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.33 lb

Man, that stomach bug last week laid me pretty low--even after I was done with the main symptoms, I had low energy levels for days afterwards. All my little mitochondria and stuff must have been really pooped after fighting off whatever infection my gut picked up!

But now I'm back in the saddle again ... and back on this latest plateau. Somehow I suspect I might be on this one for a looooooong time ... and I'm okay about that. It feels pretty comfortable, like a good base from which to work on other aspects of my health--not least of which is increasing my stamina, not just in recovery from this recent bug, but in general.

Weekly weigh-in: laid low by the stomach bug

Oops, missed a week--but I have ample excuse. First, though, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.34 lb

I dunno about other regions of the country, or even other regions of San Diego, but among my bunch of friends this really nasty stomach bug has been making its way, and last week was apparently my turn. Man, what a nasty bug. A week later, and I still feel low-energy, and my tummy still feels a wee bit off. I will spare you all the details, except to say it was a major victory when my stomach felt stable enough for me to eat some plain yogurt in an attempt to repopulate my gut with some friendlier bugs.

Interestingly, after all the past several days' worth of, erm, fluidity, my weight remains the same. I'm just as glad. Weight loss as a result of illness is not my idea of a healthy practice, let alone a good time.

Beth Ditto on being fat | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

Link: Beth Ditto on being fat | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited.

Here's a lovely little article full of empowerment and self-acceptance.

Even though I am working on healthy weight management, the "healthy" part of it includes not forcing my body down to society's exaggerated ideal of feminine slenderness--so I am "doomed" to forever be perceived as "fat" by those who are still hung up on that overly slender ideal.

Therefore, continuing to deprogram my brain from that societal tyranny of slenderness will forever be an integral part of my health regimen. And articles like the little gem linked to above are a great help in that endeavor.