How to wage war against obesity
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“Obesity seems to be an OK discrimination, it seems to be the last acceptable joke of society,” says Kris Greene, president of the British Columbia Association of Bariatric Advocates.
“The stigma of being obese, and living in a society that views fat as ugly and undesirable, is a huge blow to the psyche,” she says. “Not only are we judged by those on the outside, but more so by ourselves.” Obese people feel anger, she says, “anger at how we are judged, anger because we are ‘stuck’ in these bodies, anger because we try and try and try, to only be pushed down again. I remember each and every diet I tried, and how I felt when, once again, the diet failed — or did I fail?”
Greene was an eater of fast food and pasta. Creamy, salty foods are what she loved, and the more the better. “It fed the emotional part of me that wasn’t being filled with happiness.” She hoarded food from an early age. “Food was my best friend, my comfort, the only constant in my life I could count on.” Chips were her addiction. She would hide chocolate bars in her car, her bedroom, and snack on them when people weren’t around.
Being obese “was horrible, it was absolutely horrible. What was worse than the physical pain was the emotional pain.”
Greene had gastric bypass surgery in November 2004, when she weighed about 330 pounds. She weighs 168 pounds today, and has maintained that weight for more than five years.
Like Greene, all of the personal stories for this series involved people who underwent bypass surgery — Francina Kehoe, of Langford, B.C., Joel Sopp, of Redvers, Sask. For them, surgery was a last resort. No one is suggesting operating on every overweight person is the solution to the obesity problem. In Canada, bariatric surgery is reserved for the severely obese, people who weigh at least 100 pounds more than they should.
Understanding how we lose control in the first place could help those who are obese control their eating, Kessler says. And then, fundamentally altering the way we think about food, and changing our eating behaviours.
In his book, The End of Overeating, Kessler describes watching people in restaurants “attack their food with a special kind of gusto,” lifting their forks before having even swallowed their last bite, watching “as they reach across the table to spear a companion’s french fries or the last morsel of someone else’s dessert.”
“The easiest solution is to go live somewhere we’re not constantly bombarded with food cues and food is not available every 20 feet,” Kessler says in an interview. “But that’s unrealistic. The problem we face is the reality that, for the global food companies, their objective is growth, and growth means increased revenue, which translates into selling more foods and increasing the caloric burden of society — whether or not we need that food.”
Social norms affect behaviour, Kessler says. We succeeded in changing how society views tobacco. “We used to see it as something glamorous and sexy and cool. Now we view it for what it is: a deadly, addictive product.”
Tobacco was easy, he says, because we can live without it. Food is much harder. “You can’t demonize food,” he says. “Food needs to be enjoyable.” The goal is to change how we look at highly processed foods and “big food,” meaning big portions. “I look at huge portions now and say, ‘That’s not what I want. That’s disgusting. That’s not going to make me feel well.”
Today, Kessler, a pediatrician and former dean of the medical schools at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco, eats about half what he once did. He doesn’t want to over generalize; he knows there are millions who don’t have enough food, and others who struggle with eating disorders. “But I think, for the vast majority of us who struggle with overweight throughout our lives, we could eat half as much, and be just as satiated.”
Ultimately, he says, “The power rests with us.”
“Does the food industry need to change? Absolutely. Does government have a role? Without doubt,” he says. But in the end, he says, we need to take steps to protect ourselves from constantly having our brains bombarded and activated by cues everywhere telling us to eat.
By Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
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