Weight loss…

…a heavy subject.

 

of course, no pun intended at all 😉

 

Have this buddy on FB – used to work with the guy.

A tall beanpole of a dude.

Wife’s short and very stocky. Won’t say she’s morbidly obese, but obese would describe her very well.

He posted something on FB this morning to the effect that she’s a bit nauseous, but should be well enough to travel back to SA within about a week.

Obviously I asked what’s wrong with the wife? Get told that she went for weight-loss surgery in LA.

This guy was retrenched a month or so before me, he’s been in the dwang with money for what looks to be years, seems like one of those people born to struggle. The wife clearly wears the pants in that household.

Hey, whatever, if it works for them, fine.

 

I was kind of surprised to hear that she went all the way to the States to have the bariatric surgery done. They live just down the road from a world class hospital, with a perfectly good doctor that can do the surgery, for probably way cheaper than it would have been to pay for the lot in dollars.

 

And that brings me to the real topic for this post.

Obesity.

I don’t suppose all people are obese because they eat too much and do too little.

I realise that there can be many reasons for why you are slightly bigger than you need to be.

 

If, however, bariatric surgery would work for your weight problem, that, to me, means that if you eat less and do more, you might in all probability be able to get rid of the weight. Or at least some of it. I don’t think there really is any other way to stay within a normal weight range. And probably no easy way. Not really.

I am not advocating that all women look like Kate Moss or some Hollywood actress. Some of us are just naturally bigger than others. We all carry around a certain amount of dead weight. Weight you just can’t get rid of, no matter how hard you try.

 

Having bariatric surgery though, is a sign of the times we live in.

The society we support contains such things as heavily preserved foodstuffs, easy take-aways around every corner, transport to take you everywhere. Everything easy.

You don’t have to walk to the shops anymore, you drive there, or you do it online.

You don’t have to grow your food or maintain it – you pick it off a shelf.

You pay people to work in your garden, to clean your house, to do your laundry, wash the car, clean the pool…

You don’t have to go to the library and look for your information anymore. No more wandering around the shelves looking for the right book, bending and stretching to see what’s at the bottom or the top of the shelf. You go to Google. From you comfy chair in your study.

It’s an easy society. With people easily getting bigger than they need to be to survive, and so, instead of fighting to get people moving and doing more, doctors have devised ways of easily getting rid of the bulge. Using desperate people as their wallets.

A whole new industry has emerged in this regard.

They’re building bigger and reinforced ambulances to carry the big people to and from hospital.

They’re building bigger, reinforced beds to fit these people in.

They even build specific theatres in hospital – with a layout designed only for bariatric surgery.

Whole wings are dedicated to the surgery and it’s users – doctors and patients alike.

When I get a knitting patterns from the internet, they have not only sizes s,m,l and xl, they go up to 4xl – and that’s seriously huge!!

 

It seems that, with obesity, as with burning fossil fuels – where there’s money to be made from people’s inability to think, it will be done.

Regardless of the costs to those self same people’s lives.

 

I don’t even think I’ve scratched the surface on this topic. It’s really just my personal opinion. I’m not a thin person by any means, I don’t eat right, I don’t exercise, but I eat almost nothing when I do eat, and I do try and do things for myself. Walk to the shop every so often, dig around in the garden. If only for the simple reason I don’t have money to waste on costly gym contracts or going for an operation like this. Have to say, if I had that kind of cash I would not give it to some bloody quack!!

By no means am I an expert in anything bariatric. But I have worked in the medical field for a good many years, so I experienced this firsthand – and it does not make sense to me in the slightest.

But hey.

That’s just me.