So, I went and read that article, and thought it was--must be--fictional. It reads like fiction, not like a report of something that, you know, happened. I am not particularly familiar with the source, so am not sure whether that's likely.
Okay, and I seem to have written a whole essay of my own here, which I hope isn't obnoxious.
Anyway. If it's a fairly truthful account, I *do* think that the staff was entirely right to be concerned about a weight gain of three stone in three weeks, though. Which is not to say the tone of the article as written does any great service or talks about this well at all; if in fact the author and doctor's concern is OMG uggy fat ew, that's just weird and, well, ugly.
But, okay, 1 stone = like 14 pounds, right? I'd be damn concerned if someone I knew gained 40 pounds in 3 weeks. To do so, with reasonably normal metabolic function, would require something like a spare 6-7000 calories a day (besides what's needed to maintain weight), and since most likely it would be apparent if she were eating like that, and/or they would be able to take some serious control of portions to eliminate the problem, I'm assuming the real problem, from the doctors' point of view, if obviously not the author's, isn't about fatness/ugliness so much as about this drug resolving one very serious health concern and introducing another: a metabolic issue that makes any kind of normal eating completely impossible--if a reasonably normal diet is creating that kind of weight gain and isn't tapering off and stuff, it's not going to take long at all for the detrimental effects of a lot of excess weight (by which I do not mean 20 or even 40 extra pounds on a girl who was slender--I mean, at that rate, it's going to be a hundred or two hundred pounds, and that's a lot) on the heart, the lungs, the joints, etc, as well as whatever social issues would be of concern. What kind of restriction of diet (and nutrition) might it take to keep those kinds of troubles at bay? If there's that big of a metabolic shift going on, what else is happening, chemically? I would submit that's a very different question than what's going on chemically with someone who has over time gained a great deal of weight. Is she likely to develop other nasty chronic problems as a result? Like, okay, my brother doesn't metabolize a certain enzyme combination, which almost killed him as a baby because it is the primary nutrition in human milk. It doesn't impact him now because he is an adult and eats a range of food, but that's a metabolic disorder which had a fairly devastating impact. Might there be something of the same class of mess going on with this girl? Obviously she's not starving, but what is she doing?
So, yeah. I'm hoping that the actual medical concern, there, was about that, and also about how frustrating it is to deal with a condition where the best solution presents other, also bad, repercussions. This is of course not a new dilemma--we kill cancers with drugs and radiation which have nasty effects. We "cure" certain mental/emotional conditions with drugs that make the person living in the body feel deadened/uncreative/unspark-ish. This isn't one I've seen before, where the trade-off is so very explicitly mind/body, but I imagine if I were a practitioner who wanted every patient to be as well as she could be, I would find it hard to deal with.
Lest anyone get the idea I have no idea about being fat, I currently weigh 223 pounds, which is down 32 from where I was November 18; I have ~70 to go to reach my goal, which is still at the high end of what the charts suggest; you'll note this means I include myself in that 100+ pound group I said had a lot of extra weight. I hate that my body doesn't seem to think I should be able to eat whatever and still be healthy, but there it is. My inclusion of this note is not intended to suggest I think poorly of people who don't wish to lose weight, or can't or aren't ready or whatever. All I'm saying is, I'm familiar.
no subject
So, I went and read that article, and thought it was--must be--fictional. It reads like fiction, not like a report of something that, you know, happened. I am not particularly familiar with the source, so am not sure whether that's likely.
Okay, and I seem to have written a whole essay of my own here, which I hope isn't obnoxious.
Anyway. If it's a fairly truthful account, I *do* think that the staff was entirely right to be concerned about a weight gain of three stone in three weeks, though. Which is not to say the tone of the article as written does any great service or talks about this well at all; if in fact the author and doctor's concern is OMG uggy fat ew, that's just weird and, well, ugly.
But, okay, 1 stone = like 14 pounds, right? I'd be damn concerned if someone I knew gained 40 pounds in 3 weeks. To do so, with reasonably normal metabolic function, would require something like a spare 6-7000 calories a day (besides what's needed to maintain weight), and since most likely it would be apparent if she were eating like that, and/or they would be able to take some serious control of portions to eliminate the problem, I'm assuming the real problem, from the doctors' point of view, if obviously not the author's, isn't about fatness/ugliness so much as about this drug resolving one very serious health concern and introducing another: a metabolic issue that makes any kind of normal eating completely impossible--if a reasonably normal diet is creating that kind of weight gain and isn't tapering off and stuff, it's not going to take long at all for the detrimental effects of a lot of excess weight (by which I do not mean 20 or even 40 extra pounds on a girl who was slender--I mean, at that rate, it's going to be a hundred or two hundred pounds, and that's a lot) on the heart, the lungs, the joints, etc, as well as whatever social issues would be of concern. What kind of restriction of diet (and nutrition) might it take to keep those kinds of troubles at bay? If there's that big of a metabolic shift going on, what else is happening, chemically? I would submit that's a very different question than what's going on chemically with someone who has over time gained a great deal of weight. Is she likely to develop other nasty chronic problems as a result? Like, okay, my brother doesn't metabolize a certain enzyme combination, which almost killed him as a baby because it is the primary nutrition in human milk. It doesn't impact him now because he is an adult and eats a range of food, but that's a metabolic disorder which had a fairly devastating impact. Might there be something of the same class of mess going on with this girl? Obviously she's not starving, but what is she doing?
So, yeah. I'm hoping that the actual medical concern, there, was about that, and also about how frustrating it is to deal with a condition where the best solution presents other, also bad, repercussions. This is of course not a new dilemma--we kill cancers with drugs and radiation which have nasty effects. We "cure" certain mental/emotional conditions with drugs that make the person living in the body feel deadened/uncreative/unspark-ish. This isn't one I've seen before, where the trade-off is so very explicitly mind/body, but I imagine if I were a practitioner who wanted every patient to be as well as she could be, I would find it hard to deal with.
Lest anyone get the idea I have no idea about being fat, I currently weigh 223 pounds, which is down 32 from where I was November 18; I have ~70 to go to reach my goal, which is still at the high end of what the charts suggest; you'll note this means I include myself in that 100+ pound group I said had a lot of extra weight. I hate that my body doesn't seem to think I should be able to eat whatever and still be healthy, but there it is. My inclusion of this note is not intended to suggest I think poorly of people who don't wish to lose weight, or can't or aren't ready or whatever. All I'm saying is, I'm familiar.