New Blog 2nd try!

I’m working on what the blog will look like, and more importantly, how to use the word press software to make the blog as easy to use and still visibly pleasing as possible. Instead of worrying too much about the look, I should be more concerned with the way that blog readers would prefer the site to be set up for easy access to all the different parts. As it stands, I am still figuring out exactly how to create those different “parts” so that I can post regularly in this kind of format and have some articles that have their own place as well.

Ever since creating the obesiverse, it calls out to me to do something to it or learn something about how to “build” it every day. I have plenty of “content” that can be dumped right on into the blog, but I have to work out exactly how to set this thing up before I want to start adding a bunch of stuff. Odds are, once I start to add content, I will also regularly change the theme to see how that affects other aspects of the blog. Eventually, when I come across my favorite theme, I will probably end up leaving it that way for years. For now, I have to thank those who inspired me to even attempt to create this and make it into everything I think it can be. Right now I don’t know if I would even want to link to some of these motivators simply because there isn’t really anything here yet, and they would have plenty of reason to hesitate in linking back when there is nothing of interest to link back to. I look forward to the day when someone finds something I have written here and is moved to link to it from their blog or website or social networking site profile! I have attempted to blog on social networking sites, but the prospect of sudden deletion of one’s account with all work put into it prevented me from ever leaving any serious writing on a url that I have no control over!

Today I had a talk with someone about all things obesiverse, and I hope that I have not gotten in “over my head” so to speak! Within a few moments there was a commercial on TV for one of Kevin Trudeau’s books, and I had to comment to my friend how even he has significance to the obesiverse because he has written a book about diets that “they don’t want you to know about” lol! He has also made a comment in another book that I got ahold of that talks about publicly held companies conspiring to get everyone addicted to low nutritional value processed foods and get them eating a lot of it, becoming more and more part of the obesiverse with every bite. While he didn’t use the term “obesiverse”, he did make reference to the fact that advertising and additives put into these cheap processed foods are a part of a larger problem that people are only recently considering. It seems as if it is just too tempting and too easy to make scapegoats out of every obese person rather than to address the subtle yet traceable reason(s) for why that individual and others end up being obese in the first place.

I have a number of theories about why so many people find themselves “suddenly softer”, and if there was any doubt in my mind as to what I would write about in a blog devoted to the subject of size, it is quickly washed away when considering any one single aspect of obesity itself. I seem to come up with little phrases that best describe a certain situation, and I have done so in the case of explaining one way in which someone simply ends up being huge.

The phrase I came up with is “it takes years of dieting to get that big”. Yes, it’s so tragic and ironic that a person with the minimum amount of compassion should find some sympathy for someone suffering from this syndrome rather than casting blame and acting as if the individual could easily control what is causing them to grow to giant proportions. The very thing that people are encouraged to do to lose weight seems to have exactly the opposite affect. When someone does lose a serious amount of weight, there is a chance that they can have metabolism whiplash and end up gaining even more weight back. This happens over and over until someone is “morbidly obese”. If someone ever sees one of the giant spectacles on a medical cable television show they will wonder “how did that person get that big?”. The sad truth is that diet after diet, weight came off and then the body’s metabolism all but shut down so that upon the slightest deviation from a “permanent” diet will cause weight gain instead of maintaining a constant weight.

There is no other explanation as to why the “medical” community would choose to risk someone’s life “for their health”. It seems that most people I know, myself included, know someone personally who never made it out of the hospital alive after attempting to survive weight loss surgery. The fact that diet is almost always a failure leads to high numbers of people having this extreme surgery or some strange “newer, safer” version. I am always surprised that people don’t catch on about how crazy this surgery is when every few years another version comes out that doesn’t kill quite as many people as the last one did. Of course, any kind of surgery is risky, so someone who is morbidly obese has additional risks, yet doctors claim that the risk of having the surgery is outweighed by it’s benefits (if the patient survives).

This is where I come to one of my other phrases, “shrink’em or kill’em”. If a pill was being given to people and it was discovered that one out of a hundred people taking that pill would die, they would recall that drug pretty fast. With this surgical procedure, my research shows a .5-1% mortality rate with the bypass surgery, so that means there is a potential for one person out of a hundred to die within 30 days of having it. When hearing those stats, I wonder just how “messed up” someone has to be to accept possible death as an outcome. I just hope it’s not the “it won’t happen to me” syndrome! I have reason to doubt those low statistics because I know of several people who had the surgery and died soon after. I guess those people “don’t count” because they didn’t die fast enough after surgery, but they probably didn’t live as long as they would have if they never had the surgery at all!

This is why I have come up with the shrink’em or kill’em theory, because it seems that it’s acceptable to kill one out of one hundred people to perform a surgery that does not even keep the weight off in every patient. So, it’s sad enough that people are so fed up with being harassed about their weight that they would take a chance with their very lives to have it, but then if that patient dies, they were an “acceptable statistic” and the complication would probably blamed on the fact that the patient was so big to begin with. I can’t quite believe that the mortality rate is under one percent if I and almost everyone I talk to about it seem to know at least one individual, if not more, that died way too soon after having surgery. It still makes no sense to me that someone would risk their lives to “improve” their lives, and even worse, they seem totally at ease and even looking forward to losing the ability to ever eat or digest food like a normal human being ever again in their entire lives. So far I can’t find long term studies to see what happens to people decades after the surgery, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s because there isn’t too much concern about what happens to patients long term as long as the money is made and they keep on comin’!

When someone has the surgery, and they claim that it’s for their health, I always think about how life changing this surgery is and how it might not even work for that individual. I do know for sure that if the person survives the surgery without problems, they will still be in for some serious digestive problems for the rest of their lives. I have not done all of my research to even be talking this much about weight loss surgery, but it is one of the things that inspires me most to come out of my shell and share my obesity related experience and knowledge in this type of format. I just couldn’t wait to get to use the phrase “shrink’em or kill’em” though. It seems kind of cold to put it so bluntly, but it’s been my opinion for a long time that these surgeries amount to body modification for the sake of behavior modification. To me it seems almost cruel to use such a surgery to control an eating problem, because a person can still over-eat but will suffer horrible and rarely discussed side affects upon doing so. It’s hard for me to imagine that the medical community’s answer to a food addiction is to cut out part of the person’s stomach or use some “adjustable band” type appliance to control a person’s food intake. It just seems really strange and extreme, like removing a lung so someone can’t smoke without choking. What a way to treat an addiction though huh?

When I bring “the band” up I have to add quickly that I have read somewhere about a “portal” where the band would be accessible once it is “inside of you”. I can just imagine how sexy and attractive that will be, some kind of plastic ring that holds your skin open and keeps you from healing up so the good doctor can re-tighten your band because you shoved too much food in there and somehow moved it or even managed to stretch that thing!

When I mention the treatment of food addiction, I have to bring up the fact that surgery is done because they really don’t know what the hell else to do! They know it’s totally dangerous and crazy painful with awful complications and side affects, but there is just no other way it seems for a doctor to make money helping someone to lose weight unless they cut them open and do something!

When someone is addicted to crack, take the crack away and put the addict somewhere so they can’t get crack. When someone’s addicted to food, cut them open and cut out a piece of them. Sucks to be addicted to food then doesn’t it? You can’t just take away food, so the entire medical and psychological community is basically at a loss for exactly what to “do” about obesity. That’s the only explanation I can imagine for why doctors would be killing one out of a hundred people that get a certain procedure “for their health”.

I guess it’s probably a pretty sweeping statement for me to make, that as a non medical professional I can just look up at all the bariatric doctors and say that they can treat an under-eating disorder with psychology but they have to cut open someone with the reverse over-eating disorder. So, I guess there is a lot more money in surgery than head-shrinking! I’m no doctor and I’m not economist, but I recognize that usually medicine concentrates more on “treatment” than on “cure”. To cure means eventual bankruptcy for whoever cures this or that thing. The money is good at first, but unless you can keep churning out those cures, eventually your wonder-drug will be useless. If the surgery was even a “cure” (which statistically it’s not), then I think they would run out of patients eventually. As a “treatment” though, it’s the procedure that gets them in the door and keeps them coming back for more!

With all the anti-obesity hate-speech out there it actually feels good to write some of these thoughts out, somehow being brave enough to hope there is no consequence from the huge machine of medicine and propaganda.

If the surgery actually worked all the time, had no side affects, and didn’t kill anyone in the process, I wouldn’t have an argument against it. In fact, I would look really selfish to want to see the world “stay fat” just to please me. The truth is, I sometimes wish that the magical “one size fits all” cure to obesity would really come about. As an admirer, it would be quite an adjustment, but I am confident that there would be a few real women out there who chose to continue being who “they are” instead of transforming into who they thought they “always wanted to be”. While this might not make sense to most people, I have done a lot of reading in the area of size related issues, and I have found that occasionally someone actually celebrates the way in which size makes them unique, different, and beautiful.

It is difficult in today’s anti-obesity climate to imagine that someone finds obesity “beautiful”, but within everything there is a balance. Just like one can’t fight fate, one cannot eradicate the balance. Even after all efforts to change the way things are, the balance will remain in affect. To illustrate the way in which this delicate balance exists, I can point out that the inspiration to create the obesiverse came from the over-use in this day and age of the word “obesity”.

Within minutes, I’ve rambled away one entry into this brand spanking new blog! This wasn’t even really the way I would have broached the subject of weight loss surgery, but I guess I can’t hide one of the things that motivates me to express my passion for size acceptance as the fat bodies of weight loss surgery victims continue to be buried every single day. I am sure that I will be writing more about the whole dreaded subject of extreme surgery, but I have to provide a link to something I found and was astounded by how much I agree with. Ten reasons why I hate weight loss surgery by Charlotte Cooper. Wow! That was one thing that inspired me to begin to attempt creating the obesiverse. She also wrote about something that I had actually written about at some point myself, but I made the mistake of blogging on a social networking site so it never was actually in the “real blogosphere”! :) She wrote about Headless Fatties and I thought it was awesome because I also agree wholeheartedly with her views on that!

I love just about everything I’ve read on that blog, but I have a serious science fiction perspective on the venus of willendorf that nobody has probably come close to and I look forward to addressing that as the obesiverse continues it’s evolution into eventual relevance! :)