Obesity

[Ricky44]

Name changed for this as it’s outing.

My Mum has a friend who is morbidly obese. She was diagnosed as type 2 diabetes a good few years ago but she doesn’t lose weight, even though she has been advised to do so. She is now too large to move and is in a wheelchair. She has just been told she may have to have her foot amputated.

She told me that she doesn’t believe that her obesity is caused by overeating, it must be caused by something else. She has been tested for various things as she has been under specialist care for a number of years but thinks the NHS must have missed something. I hadn’t seen her for a year or so, until the weekend, and was quite shocked when I saw her.

I’m wondering if it’s a food addiction or something else? I used to smoke but quit 6 years ago so I do have some understanding of addiction. I’m also aware that you can go cold turkey when you quit smoking but you can’t do that with food - I know that if I smoked 1 cig I could well smoke the whole packet. So how do you give up over eating when everyone still has to eat something.

I quit smoking when I got a cough that I couldn’t shift and I worried that I’d done some permanent damage (I may well have done and it might not be obvious for a few years but I’m hoping I quit in time).

My BMI crept up to 25 a month ago so I’ve been on a diet, I need to lose about a stone to get back down to a healthier weight, ive lost about 3 lbs so nothing major but it’s going in the right direction and I am trying to stop myself from becoming obese in the future.

This isn’t meant to be provocative, I’m just trying to understand how someone could get into this state without trying to do something about it?

The tax on alcohol has always been in existence as VAT never as a 'sin tax' like the sugar levy.

@Ihopeyourcakeisshit

I don’t know what the answer is either. I’m just throwing a few things out there.

I was shocked at the state of my mums friend but I mostly just felt really sad for her. Something has gone terribly wrong and for some reason she hasn’t been helped.

I think there is a big difference between the people who end up like my mums friend and the people that are just tipping over into obese.

What’s gone wrong for OPs friend could well be very complex. Different from the average female, who is 2 stone 2 lbs overweight (I just looked it up).

If we go back to the taxing of fat, sugar, processed crap, fried chicken shops etc...

If average female is overweight / borderline obese due to a crap diet of massive bags of crisps for elevenses, a doughnut for afternoon snack and a takeaway for dinner, then if we tax all that, her food bill will shoot up and she’ll notice. That shock might make her think and she might just have the donut and something healthier (as healthier food will now be substantially cheaper) one day and then the next maybe the takeaway and something healthier, so that she can get her food bill down. If she does this over a year she might lose about a stone.

The issue with fat tax is it taxes healthy foods like cheese and certain meats that are ok in moderation.

We do have structural problems in our society though - shit food is and has been too easy to get hold of, as well as being mass produced, so cheap. People have got fatter so being 2 stone overweight is now normal, it’s also seen as being normal. I look at girls in their late teens and early 20s, they seem to flaunt what I see as fat bodies in figure hugging clothing. That didn’t happen when I was younger, it was more unusual to be fat and the odd overweight person would cover themselves more.