• TheDoozer@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    I’ve had almost exclusively military doctors for nearly two decades, and I can tell you they aren’t trying to respect your feelings (not that they’re dicks). If your tests come back with high cholesterol, they aren’t jumping to Lipitor or some shit, they’ll refer you to a nutritionist and tell you to exercise more. They have no problems telling you that your health troubles come from that weight crushing your organs and joints.

    And that’s as a person in the military, who has to maintain a certain level if fitness to keep my job.

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        I had a dentist give me an unnecessary root canal when a filling broke and they didn’t even do it right. I’m still pretty salty about it. I’ll always get a second opinion moving forward.

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          22 hours ago

          Do y’all not have separate endodontists that do root canals only? That’s the norm here that dentists refer out for specialty work like oral surgery and root canals.

          • SoleInvictus
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            13 hours ago

            We do, but I didn’t even know they existed before this incident. I’ve luckily had few dental issues.

        • Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee
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          24 hours ago

          Sooo what are the consequences of not getting it done right? I had one done recently and I am worried.

          • SoleInvictus
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            13 hours ago

            Red aggro nailed it. There’s a gap at the gum line between my remaining tooth and the crown, leaving exposed dentin.

          • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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            22 hours ago

            Depends on how it “wasn’t done right”. If they didn’t clean it out properly and there’s still decay? Losing that tooth when it hurts again. Gap in the cement for the crown? New crown. And so on.

  • gaja@lemm.ee
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    Got a lot to say but I’ll keep it brief-ish. Corporations love unhealthy people. They will artificially celebrate this and reinforce unhealthy lifestyles. This extends beyond weight.

    Once entrapped, escape is hard. Some are passive and depressed. Some are dismissive and defensive. No matter which cycle you are in, it’s unhealthy.

    I think smoking is bad like I think being overweight is bad. If a doctor says alcohol is killing you, it probably is. I don’t think hatred is deserved, but don’t expect any validation for those choices.

    • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeOP
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      The meme isn’t about that, I’ve read stories of some doctors refusing to perform surguries to overweight people, but other doctors doing the surgery anyway.

      The same way a lot of women get told stuff is just from their period by doctors.

      • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        My mother had a doctor that refused to move forward with knee surgery because she was so depressed and refused to do therapy because it hurt her knee so much to move around.

        I guess I understand, why go through the trouble of surgery if she’s just going to be a bummer couch potato afterwards and never change her ways?

        But at least she’d be a bummer couch potato whose knee didn’t threaten to give out on her whenever she tried to do laundry in the basement.

        If I take my car in for new brake pads, don’t refuse me service because the transmission is on its way out.

      • medgremlin@midwest.social
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        I’m a medical student and I have some direct experience with this. Sometimes, the difference between the surgeon who will do the procedure versus the surgeon that won’t do the procedure is the availability of specialized facilities and equipment that they have access to. An elective surgery (i.e. not an emergency surgery) can go from routine to very high risk depending on the amount of adipose tissue the patient has.

        And it’s not just a matter of the fat tissue overlying the surgical site. Morbidly obese patients are much more likely to have things like sleep apnea which can make anesthesia more risky and might require more specialized equipment than a particular surgeon/hospital/anesthesiologist might have access to. The “morbid” part of “morbid obesity” also refers to the fact that people above a certain threshold of weight are much more likely to have other health conditions like heart disease that make anesthesia more risky.

        • uselessRN@lemm.ee
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          This is what I came to say but wasn’t smart enough to put into words. There’s a lot more factors than just being overweight of why a surgery can’t be performed. For a while an issue at my hospital was we were one of the few in the area that could do MRIs on larger patients. So bigger hospitals would transfer these patients to us just for an MRI because their MRI machine was too small or couldn’t handle the weight.

          • medgremlin@midwest.social
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            There’s a reason you have to get a pre-op physical exam for any non-emergent surgery. Figuring out if you’ll wake up from the anesthesia at all is part of the calculus that determines whether the benefits of the procedure outweigh the risks.

          • medgremlin@midwest.social
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            24 hours ago

            Sometimes. It depends why the first surgeon would be unable to do the procedure. If the problem is that the patient might not wake up from anesthesia because of problems with heart disease, lung problems, or other metabolic issues, then it doesn’t really matter what the surgeon has to say about actually doing the procedure because the anesthesiologist is the one saying “no”. If it’s an issue of too much adipose, sometimes it would mean that the surgery would take longer than it’s safe for the patient to be under anesthesia.

            Another possibility is that the first surgeon operates at a facility that doesn’t have access to more advanced technologies or other medical specialists in the event that something goes wrong. And there are some surgeons that are just more willing to accept the risk of a bad outcome, and I would argue that that’s rarely in the patient’s best interest. There are alternative options that the surgeon should discuss with the patient as part of the informed consent process, and sometimes, the alternatives to surgery are just safer than the risk of the surgery itself, even if they aren’t as effective or are a long term treatment (ongoing) as opposed to a definitive treatment (cure). If the patient has a high risk of serious complications, up to and including death, then attempting the curative procedure might be more risk than it’s worth compared to a long term medication that mitigates the disease.

            You’ll see this with pregnant patients too. For elective procedures that have safer alternatives or temporizing measures (a holdover treatment until surgery is safe), those are generally preferred to putting a pregnant patient under anesthesia because of all the cardiovascular, immunologic, and other physiologic changes that happen during pregnancy alongside potential risks to the fetus.

      • The reason for that is that surgeons are rated based on their success percentages meaning they’ll recommend against risky surgeries.

        The upside of this is that surgeons aren’t operating willy-nilly on people and will make a proper risk assessment. The downside is that overweight people have an inherently higher risk of complications from surgery, so some surgeons will pass.

        It’s not because they think these people don’t need it, it’s because they think it’s too risky. They’re usually not wrong about that, you just need to find a surgeon willing to take the risk or, if possible, reduce the risk by losing weight.

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          There’s also no point to surgeries if the people aren’t committed and are just going to eat even more and put the weight back on. It’s like consolidating debt to make one payment easier but keeping all the credit cards and building up the debt again. It just makes you worse off

          • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            That depends on the surgery. Gastric bypass notoriously has weight requirements, but a gallbladder removal can still kill you if you’re too fat, and there definitely is a point to doing that even if the patient isn’t going to change their diet.

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            That’s why where I am from you usually need a clearance from a psychiatrist that there are no psychological issues in eating habits that would render that surgery useless, before the surgeon is allowed to do it

      • gaja@lemm.ee
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        Look. Shitty doctors exist, but when 1/3 of the US is overweight, there are underlying issues that need addressing. I only hear horror stories when an addict, alcoholic, or overweight individual in my life is feeling insecure or defensive about a prognosis. Too many people deflect and it’s enabling a much larger issues. Our basic instincts are being exploited.

        • geekgrrl0@lemmy.ca
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          I have some horror stories about being a normal weight woman seeking medical care. What’s that about then?

            • geekgrrl0@lemmy.ca
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              18 hours ago

              I don’t know, the medical community ignoring fat people’s health concerns (beyond obesity) and ignoring women’s health concerns, seem to be the same issue and I posit they are the same cause too (hubris, arrogance, and just simply not living up to their oath)

        • msprout@lemmy.world
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          America’s obesity epidemic is a function of our car culture. This is the only country on God’s green Earth that feels putting in sidewalks is a moral failure.

      • HollowNaught@lemmy.world
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        When talking about obese individuals, the fat very easily gets in the way of surgery. Compared to a healthy patient the risk of complications during surgery is much greater and really not worth chancing it (most if the time)

    • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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      I am down 50+ pounds, and have another 20 to go. This is new to me, but I absolutely agree with everything you said.

    • Estradiol Enjoyer
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      You are ignorant of the genetic factors at play here and I think you need to realize that your rhetoric is identical to victim blaming eugenics ideology. You sound like RFK Jr. and I’m guessing you would want me dead if you could have things that way. It’s honestly despicable and I don’t know how people like you sleep at night.

      • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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        Used to see the odd “genetics” fat person and they’d just be built a bit bigger. Now I’m seeing fucking waddling planetoids and that’s not genetics man. Part of that blame belongs to individuals but part of it belongs to the food lobbyists and their quest to add sugar and corn syrup to everything.

        Incentivise people to grow their own vegetables (or source them locally from those who already are) and disincentivise the purchase of processed and sweetened food. Have our agencies promote healthy recipes using weight rather than volume measurements and show people how to use scales to properly weigh ingredients and help make it as easy as possible to count calories.

      • kcweller@feddit.nl
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        Buddy, you’re over stating the importance of genetics. Time and time again it shows that getting bigger is more nurture than nature. Papers and research retounely come out saying its a two-sides of the same coin issue, but then fail to support their nature/genetics claims, which are often refuted. Slender families get children who end up obese because of lifestyle, and their children become obese. That’s not genetics. The grandchildren end up obese because obese parents place their lifestyle and diets onto their children.

        Claiming something is victim blaming is insanely disrespectful to the people who actually get blamed for things out of their control. Your weight is in your control for the vast, VAST majority of people.

        People with disabilities who can’t get an opportunity to do something about it? Sure. Can that disability come from genetics, sure. But that’s a small minority of people who are overweight.

          • kcweller@feddit.nl
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            Read the sources here and you see that monogenetic, epigenetic and polygenetic obesity is only partly of influence on actually becoming obese, and that with a proper healthy environment (which not everyone has access too, I understand) obesity doesn’t need to develop.

            https://obesitymedicine.org/blog/obesity-and-genetics/

            Meanwhile, where are the sources supporting the initial statement?

          • klemptor@startrek.website
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            This is a recent problem. Do we think those purported fat genes just evolved in society over the past eightyish years, and spread so widely that, per the 2017-2018 NHANES data, 73% of American adults are overweight (30.7%) or obese (42.4%)? On a population level it’s clear this cannot be genetic. There’s been a cultural shift that has caused this problem, often thought to be related to processed food, less time to cook, and for some underserved communities, food deserts.

            Look at how dramatically obesity has risen since the '80s:

            • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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              It’s an overly simplistic view of the very complex set of issues. Even if we isolate the weight, which we shouldn’t do, even if we assume we should all strive to be of some set weight, which we shouldn’t do even harder, there is no one definitive factor that contributes to that. Reducting it all to “just eat better bro” is, in a lot of cases, akin to saying to a person with depression “just stop being sad”.
              There is no “weight gene”, but it doesn’t mean there is no underlying physical issues that a person can’t overcome with just a sheer force of will.
              And that’s not even going into the poverty cycle issue, which means that for some people better dietary choices simply unavailable.
              Notice, I don’t know the percentage of people with it, but neither do you. But the problem is, weather a person can do something about their weight or not, putting all the, pardon the pun, weight of their bodyshape on them is almost never helpful, and almost always harmful.

              • supamanc@lemmy.world
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                19 hours ago

                Yeah, but an unforgivable number of people simply don’t understand calories, or nutrition, or the benefits of excersise. Like, I know several overweight people, who are profoundly upset at being overweight, but refute the idea that managing calorie intake would help, _genuinely _ believe that all food is equal, and don’t believe excersise would help improve their health.

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        Hear me out. You’re villainizing me because what I said struck a nerve. You don’t actually believe I want you dead. You’re just upset that I pointed out a deep flaw. Maybe it’s an insecurity, or cognitive dissonance, or whatever. I’m very familiar with this type of response. Whatever it is, realize that someone likely depends on you and that an unhealthy lifestyle is not good for them. I’m encouraging you to do better, if not for yourself, the people in your life you care for. I recognize my ignorance. I’m not a therapist. I’m just stating something I’ve personally observed.

  • RangerJosey@lemmy.ml
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    Me: “I’ve tried everything I am physically capable of trying short of anorexia. Ive tried to walk. Ive tried lifting weights. I’ve even starved myself. 200 calories every other day for 3 months. Nothing works. I think I may have a legitimate medical issue”

    Doctor: “Drink water and walk. Thatll be $250.”

    Me:

    • slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
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      You would be stufied because it’s impressive that your body can just grab calories out of thin air. Obese people lie about what they eat, it’s really simple. That’s why doctors don’t take these people serios.

      • That Weird Vegan
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        the thing is, people SEVERELY underestimate how many calories are in what they’re eating. Ask any fat how much calories a chocolate bar has, and they’ll say something like “50?”

        • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          This. 200 calories is not very much food. That’s like 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, a little over 1 banana, a little less than 3 eggs, about 30 individual almonds, or little over half an avocado.

          A single Hershey’s chocolate bar, mountain dew, or the smallest size of my favorite star bucks drinks are all over 200 calories too.

    • kadup@lemmy.world
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      It’s important to notice that while an underlying medical issue is certainly likely in your situation, and that’s hard to work against… There’s no physical way you were actually ingesting 200 daily calories and didn’t lose weight.

      This is beyond biology, it’s physical. You were either consuming way more than that, or you were actually losing weight and just didn’t notice. There’s no alternative.

      • TheYojimbo@lemmy.world
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        I mean they said every other day, if one day they get 200 and the next they get 5000 they ain’t losing weight…

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          Are they doing that or is this just a “stupid idiot is clearly just cheating” blanket retort?

          Had a friend who was overweight and got into long distance running. He went from 300 lbs to a lean, mean 140. Then he injured his knee and had to give up his sport. Simple diet didn’t work, he steadily put on 100 lbs over the next two years.

          Another girl I know cleans straight through 3000+ calories a day easy. Never went above 120. In fact, if she’s not housing down food she gets weak and anemic.

          That’s got nothing to do with intake and everything to do with metabolism

          • gamer@lemm.ee
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            This is like vaccine skepticism.

            Fat people are fat because they eat too much.

            If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert after dinner if he doesn’t want to be fat.

              • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
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                i hear the metabolism also stays the same regardless of weight. you actually need a deficit compared to your baseline.

                anedoctally though, my parner eats much less than me, but is heavier somehow.

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                Completely anecdotal, but I have to assume that is incorrect, or that I have a fundamental misunderstanding. I have done tests and found that my body processes(in one hole->out another) food in about an hour. Which is absolutely insane and results in most of my evacuate being unprocessed. I’ve read that for other people in similar tests, they tend to average around 12 hours. Im guessing that means my understanding of what contitutes metabolism is incorrect?

                • kadup@lemmy.world
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                  You’re confusing solid food in my mouth with calories ingested.

                  If for whatever physiological reason your claim is correct, and your digestive system is indeed so fast food goes through unprocessed, you didn’t actually eat. You’ve eaten in the social, pleasurable or psychological sense, but these are not ingested calories, and therefore also completely irrelevant to your metabolism or diet.

                  If you could take a 1000 calorie burguer, cover it in plastic, swallow it and have it pass through intact… You just ingested zero calories. So you can’t later say “oh I regularly eat 1000 calories per meal and lose weight, but my partner chews a 300 calorie steak and gains weight!”

                  If you see what I mean.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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              Fat people are fat because they eat too much.

              You can have the same diet your entire life and fluctuate in weight significantly.

              If Bob has a “slow metabolism”, then Bob should stop eating desert

              Anything else? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Is your singular goal your weight or do you have any other considerations?

              • gamer@lemm.ee
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                I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the diet question. That neither invalidates nor supports what I said.

                If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat. I don’t care what other people do with their lives. I’m just pointing out that the reason why a person becomes fat is well-known, proven science. Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism; it’s actively harmful to society. The past 8 years are a great example of what happens when we allow misinformation and pseudoscience to propagate, even if it seems silly/fringe/nobody-actually-believes-that.

                • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                  If someone wants to be fat, they can be fat.

                  This isn’t a binary choice.

                  Denying that is akin to vaccine skepticism

                  Fad diets are the height of pseudo-science and routinely harm their practitioners.

                  It’s not a coincidence that vaccine skeptics are regularly peddling weight lose programs and other quack remedies that don’t work. Guys like Dr Oz and RJK Jr are at the forefront of both grifts.

              • desktop_user
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                That may be the case, however the percentage of overweight individuals that almost certianly (as in the misreporting, not the percentage) misreport their caloric intake to their doctors is high enough that many doctors will just assume that they all lie.If they wanted to be believed they would either need actual evidence for their claims or to lose weight.

          • TheYojimbo@lemmy.world
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            I’m not an expert but I believe that everyone needs different intakes, depending on metabolism and activity, but if you go lower you lose weight. I went through a diet where the only thing I did was count the calories, and it worked really well.

          • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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            Yeah, unfortunately this kinda only goes one way. No matter your metabolism, if you starve yourself you will lose weight. It’s literally physically impossible for you to not. It’s just difficult and wildly unhealthy to lose weight that way.

            Whereas the opposite is not neccassarily true, depending on your metabolism you very well might be able to eat as nuch as you want. You might even have to eat more than you are comfortable with just to maintain your weight, which is what I deal with. With the right metabolism, there could be a situation where there is no upper limit on how much you could eat without gaining weight.

            Caveats include: obviously if you eat a pound of food your weight goes up by a pound, but assuming you are similar to me, after that passes through you your weight goes back down to effectively the exact same as it was before you ate. Im not glorifying a fast metabolism here, in fact my metabolism is no fast that I don’t get most of the nutients i eat and am therefore perpetually malnourished no matter what or how much I eat. I spend more on food to maintain my weight than i do on literally everything else combined, excluding rent, and maybe gas.

            Oddly, although scaling my food does not seem to scale nutrients from my food, scaling my caloric burn does seem to impact my appetite. When I was working a physical job, i was consuming about 4000 calories/day and most of the time i felt like I was on the edge of passing out from never ending fatigue. I’d wake up and spend every moment of the day starving. Now, i work a very relaxed job and my appetite has vanished. I often go days without eating and dont seem to be losing a significant amount of weight, unlike back when. Although when I do eat I tend to eat multiple huge meals in a day, often about once/twice a week, and my weight afterwards doesnt seem to go up, it just stops going down for a day or two. The only way for me to gain weight seems to be to lose it first, I literally cannot get above 160lb at 6"2’

    • lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world
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      200 calories every other day

      Forgot to mention the 8000 calories on the alternating days but I’m sure that’s fine

    • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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      None of that is what you should be doing. I mean yes you should be exercising. But not the way you are going about it. For context, I just lost 50 pounds, and have another 20 to go. I got a scary liver diagnosis due to a lifetime of overeating.

      Download a calorie tracker and be super honest with it. At first don’t be as concerned with staying within your calories as you are about building the habit to ALWAYS log everything. Seeing it laid out has more impact than anything else in changing your daily habits. Don’t be tempted to skip little tastes, licks, and bites.

      Additionally, do not starve yourself! Slowly change your habits and your body will do the rest. Starving yourself will only trigger your body into gaining weight by holding onto everything it gets. It will also make just about everyone quit within a few weeks. If you are finding yourself constantly starving (as opposed to occasionally hungry) then you need to make adjustments to what you are eating. Swap foods for better options. I swapped my late night chips, which kept me awake while driving trains at 3 am with no sleep for two days, with baby carrots I bought at the gas station. I found potatoes helpful in keeping full in the past, but had to avoid them for the liver. Potatoes aren’t super high in calories, but sour cream, bacon, cheese, and/or deep frying them is.

      Remember that your body adapts to the foods you regularly eat in about 4-6 weeks. So if you start eating healthy foods you hate, like a salad with tuna and sliced beets, you will start to crave it in about a month and a half. (Tuna has fish oils and beets are chock full of antioxidants). I have hated oatmeal for 40+ years, and now that is my preferred breakfast. I tried to make myself like it over and over but this time I stuck with it long enough to actually get my body hooked on that particular set of nutrients.

      Oh, and if you set your home address to Europe in My Fitness Pal, it gives you some of the premium features, like the barcode scanner.

      Absolutely quit soda and energy drinks. That one is just hard and there really isn’t an easy answer for it. Sparkling water helps a bit, but really just plain water is the best at satisfying those cravings. Oh, and you will develop a massive sweet tooth when you quit soda. But if you try to stay within calories and drink a Mt Dew you will be starving by the end of the day. Diet soda is NOT better just because it doesn’t have calories. It messes with the way your body processes and stores everything else it gets making it just as bad (worse) than the regular stuff. Stevia is ok for a lot of things, but getting your tastes used to less sugar is a huge step in losing weight and getting healthier.

    • toadjones79@lemm.ee
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      I can’t believe it took me 45 years to try that but man am I happy I did. Well, I’m almost there. None of my clothes fit anymore though.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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    Obesity is a disease, so it should be treated as such. It’s not more of a personal failure then getting lung cancer from smoking.

    Yet tobacco companies are shamed and taxed, while the sellers of addictive junk foods and sugary waters are thrivingcand marketing for children.

    And at the end, people are dying, and taxpayers are paying the cost for capitalist greed.

    • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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      Nobody blames the patient for getting lung cancer, they blame the patient for smoking for years knowing the risks.

      Same thing with obesity related heart issues. You aren’t being blamed for the heart issues, you are being blamed for eating yourself into obesity.

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      There’s a saying: “it’s not your fault, but you are the only person who can solve it”.

      Only you can reduce your calories, only you can stop smoking and only you can quit alcohol. That’s shitty that you have to, and in an ideal world it wouldn’t be like this, but it is.

  • FundMECFS
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    The patient is a women, in poverty, disabled, mentally ill…

    Medical culture is unbelievably bigoted.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      Sort of. We have drugs that can help you lose weight, but they come with their own challenges and risks, and you still need to eat right and exercise. And even then, it’s prescribed and covered for diagnosed diabetes. If you want it to lose weight, you probably have to pay for it.

      Eating right is much more difficult than people pretend it is, and exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people. You might as well say “don’t be poor, and also don’t be poor.”

      So when you say on top of that, “we’ve made it easier for you to lose weight with this new drug, as long as you aren’t poor,” that’s not really helpful.

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        exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people.

        I’m not fat, but that seems simply untrue unless the person is fat due to a serious disability in the first place. Maybe doing intense exercise isn’t possible, but fat people can absolutely start with small, little exercises and work their way up over months or years.

        • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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          You’re right, of course, it’s not impossible, but as someone who’s had several significant changes in BMI/body fat in my life, I can tell you exercising when you’re already in decent shape is SO much easier.

          Being fat makes a lot of potential options for exercise much more difficult if not outright impossible. One of the biggest ways to stay active is to find something you actually like doing, so the fewer options you have, the harder it is.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          I wasn’t going to get into it, but I think you’ll find disability is far more widespread than you think it is, and the other limiting factor is poverty. Obese people skew poor for the first time in history, and it’s because the working poor are limited in food choice, healthcare, and disposable time. People who say “start small and work your way up over months or years” never worked 80 hours a week for minimum wage and it shows.

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            …if there’s [a pool] available near them.

            Speaking of institutional racism…

            This validated a new normal across America: When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the U.S.

            Not only did racism deprive black people of access to pools (leading to stereotypes like “black people don’t swim” etc.), it also greatly reduced it for white people, especially ones not wealthy enough to pay for membership to one of the private pools that sprang up in the wake of the closures of the public pools.

            We are all sicker because of the bigots’ hate.

          • Zetta@mander.xyz
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            ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In the sample size of the few fat people I know IRL and their family’s that’s not true, at least for the people I know. Unless we’re counting mental illness as a medical condition, which is fair because they are.

            • hissing meerkat@sh.itjust.works
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              Mental illnesses are absolutely medical conditions. Many of them have physical origins; your brain is a physical organ in your body. Mental illnesses with social or experiential origins are also medical conditions that can demand both physical and mental care. The brain can have a physical impact on the body that also need care. Your brain is the main organ in your body that predicts what will happen in the future, and other parts of your body respond to it to regulate biological functions, as famously demonstrated by Pavlov’s experiments with conditioning dogs by experience to get a response from their digestive (salivary) glands.

      • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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        Now it is also prescribed for obesity, not just diabetes. And I think very much worth it from a societal perspective, as the healthcare costs of obesity are extreme.

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        My parents and my fiancee have gotten on an equivalent of Ozempic specifically for weight loss and covered by insurance. It seems to be easier now than it was, because if my fiancee wasn’t covered we absolutely couldn’t afford it.

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            Excellent question, but I have no idea. She tears the medicine labels off for some reason so I’ll ask her when she gets home and edit with more info. It’s a capsule and a tiny pill, taken morning and night respectively, if that means anything to you.

            Edit: Phentermine and topiramate

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      They are, and they absolutely changed my life. I was never obese, but almost always overweight since childhood.

      As an adult, I used Saxenda (liraglutide) for almost 3 years, prescribed by my gastro doc. I lost 25 kgs with it, out of which only 3 was muscle mass. I only needed half the max dose, and now they even have a newer and more effective formula.

      I was afraid I would gain it back after stopping, as I was warned, but I stopped half a year ago, and I lost 5 kg more with only diet since then. And by diet I don’t mean starving myself, just switching to super healthy and natural stuff, and staying away from processed food.

      Before this med, I ate too much, and even though I tried to stay away from stuff with added sugar or too much fat, it just added up. The drug took away my excessive hunger, and at the beginning I just ate less, but after a few months I also changed my diet to be more fresh and healthy, and the fat just kept melting away.

      Now I’m in my mid 30s, and look better then ever, and also got rid of health conditions (like minor high blood pressure) that would cause a mess later. And again, I was never obese, only overweight, so I can’t even imagine the impact this would have on dangerously obese people.

      Incredible technology, I think a lot of people will take these in the future. And my case shows that it’s not true that you have to take it forever: if you can adjust your diet and life over a period of a few years, your body will “heal” and help you to keep the fat down later.

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      And unbelievably expensive, and unbelievably good at regulating an A1C.

      Now if you excuse me, I am gonna go and break down crying to the insurance rep about how Ozempic is way better than metformin at not making me shit my pants. I swear I am not making excuses just to lose weight. (Please someone, stop the madness, if I can get semiglutides that doesn’t make you lose weight but regulates my A1C I would be so happy)

      • medgremlin@midwest.social
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        Another option for diabetes are the SGLT-2 inhibitors like Jardiance. They work by making you pee out all the excess sugar. You won’t have the diarrhea issues, but you will be peeing a lot. (It’s basically a special diuretic, so it’s also really good for blood pressure.) Bonus: they’ve also gained approval for slowing the progression of diabetic nephropathy (kidney disease), so if that’s something you have any trouble with, it can help get it covered.

      • hissing meerkat@sh.itjust.works
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        I hope you get the care you deserve.

        Until then talk to your doctor about:

        • if you can adjust dosage yourself so that you only take metformin in amounts or at times/circumstances that won’t make you sick
        • if you can try the extended release (or vice versa) formulation of metformin
        • talk to your doctor/dietician about when you should take it during a meal to minimize side effects.
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      Friend of mine has been on wegovy and has lost almost 40 pounds in 4-5 months. It was almost discouraging to hear that as it has taken me two years to set the correct habits to lose almost 35 pounds (and keep it off).

      The side effects of those drugs are real though. My friend says she constantly feels nausea and it’s weird to see her eat so little… When we go out I would be surprised if she even eats half her plate, if that.

      It’s been a long journey for me personally to lose weight. I had to teach myself how to use gym equipment, cut out all sodas, and to suppress my cravings. To see people take what looks like “the easy way out” can sting… but in the end, I feel better then ever.

    • HollowNaught@lemmy.world
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      I’d there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my studies, it’s that weight los drugs are shiiiiiit

      Not because they don’t work, but because a general effect like “weight loss” usually comes with more than a few downsides

      • medgremlin@midwest.social
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        One of the biggest problems with the GLP-1’s (Ozempic, etc) is the fact that people lose weight by just not eating as much, and the things they do eat aren’t likely to be very nutritious. Protein malnutrition and muscle wasting are very common sources of weight loss on Ozempic. That’s why it’s standard of care to get your patient to a licensed dietician before starting them on one of those drugs if at all possible.