CompuServe Messages

There is medical evidence up the kazoo that weight is caused primarily by genes; fat folks were the ones who survived the periodic famines. The largest percentage any of the dozens of research projects has come up with for PSYCHOLOGICAL obesity is about 15%; alas, that's large enough to make a missionary corps. In the other 85%, the less you eat the quicker your body switches to starvation mode in which the entire metabolism changes to become much more efficient so more can be stored. That's why diets tend to hit walls after the water's lost, and why weight gain is so dramatic in most people who lose a lot of weight within 2 years of going off the diet. Only exercise really can change the body's set point; other than that, you just must pick your parents more carefully. I've always been a very large person and it's never bothered me, although it bothers other people sometimes. The others it bothers are people I'd just assume not associate with. My parents DID endow me with congenital LOW blood pressure, too, so my capacity for pressure-raising caffiene is almost infinite and I don't have the baggage everybody assumes with large people. In fact, I believe I will one day lose my left arm to prejudiced nurses who insist on taking my blood pressure four or five times because they simply can't believe that a large person can have low blood pressure. Naturally, by that time my arm's numb and I'm screaming at them and that tends to raise my pressure to almost normal so they're happy. I often wondered how many earlier deaths by overweight people are due to the stress placed on them by others rather than from anything they themselves consume. Poor Bill Clinton–I can't jog a lick, this fellow jogs a couple of miles every day and is hardly winded, and the reporters who are gasping for breath keeping up with him don't hesitate to criticize him for eating well and being a tad over the insurance company weight norms! If you don't smoke, don't drink, and jog 5km a day with ease, you're in very good shape no matter what else they may say. More than once I've thought of the current generation as ones so terrified of dying and so fixated on the superficial that they don't know how to live.