What causes someone to be morbidly obese?

I'm in a 12 step program for food addiction, and most of the people come in with anywhere from 40 - 100 pounds excess fat that they often say is the result of eating "a ton" of sugar. For those of you who don't know, the word "sugar" is used in the food addiction recovery meetings to indicate food like candy, cakes, pies, donuts, cookies, ice cream--you know, the sweet stuff. Now, I'm not averse to eating sweets myself, but only after I have had what my family called "real food", which was usually high fat protein (steak, fried chicken or pork chops, homemade hamburgers or meatloaf), LOTS of bread slathered in butter and some kind vegetables as a side dish. Then it was dessert. Snacks could be anything from a soup bowl filled with cereal and milk or a hot link sandwich with mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup and hot sauce. Oh, you thought I meant potato chips or popcorn for a snack? Yes, but that stuff was usually paired with the hot link sandwich. And I topped it all off with cookies and milk. THAT, my friends, is how a person eats their way into a 400+ pound body by age 40. By the grace of God, I don't eat like that anymore. It's truly a miracle, but I have to remember that it's a one day at a time issue. I can't afford to forget that I am a real hardcore, self destructive food addict who, without the help of a Higher Power Who I don't really understand (but pray and ask for help with this addiction all the time), and the food addiction recovery program, my family would have buried me a long time ago.

Here's some food related stories and videos that I recently found. Please read the Huffington Post story that I've posted, and watch the Jamie Oliver video that's posted below that. By the way, I was more than appalled that even though the kids in the video knew that those chicken nuggets contained ingredients that they all said "EWWWW!" and scrunched up their noses at when Jamie showed them what goes into the nuggets, when Jamie asked them if they wanted to eat any, they all raised their hands and said "yes". Why? "Because we're hungry!" Wow. Nice, Madison Avenue. You've effectively brain-snatched America's kids.

I nearly fainted one day when a young mom with a toddler in a stroller asked her little one "Do you want Wendy's or Taco Bell for dinner?" I saw another one giving her infant some Fanta orange soda one day. The child couldn't have been older than six months. That's like shooting diabetes into your child's veins! I kept my mouth shut, but I was screaming inside. In my opinion, this what mass marketing does--encourage people to become zombie consumers. The messages to buy that garbage are so persuasive that there isn't much resistance to keeping large quantities of it in their homes. My parents didn't feed me that stuff all the time; they did everything they could to limit my portion sizes, encourage me to eat all my vegetables (which I HATED), and stop me from drinking more than one soda a day.

It bears mentioning that the sugar content for sodas was different back in 60s because the soft drink companies used cane sugar instead high fructose corn syrup. Cane sugar still creates "sugar cravings" and metabolizes the same way in the body, but there's something about HFCS that seems to cause people to pack on the pounds faster and put them into hard core sugar addict mode. One example: when school districts were voting to take HFCS sweetened sodas out of their vending machines back in the late 90s/early 2000, a very obese teenaged girl who was being interviewed by a local Sacramento (CA) news station claimed that she was going to stop coming to school if they got rid of the sweet stuff because she HAD to have her sodas. (Unfortunately, I can't locate that news story, but I believe it was done by either KCRA Channel 3 or Channel 10 in Sacramento.)

However, I think I was one of those kids who was genetically predisposed to food addiction. There's nothing my mother and father could have done to prevent me from being a food addict, and they spent a lot of money trying. No amount of diets, nutritional consults with doctors, hypnotherapy or even locking up the refrigerator worked for long. I became a sneak, creeping into the kitchen to get another slice of my mother's meat loaf for a sandwich, or grab a bowl of her amazing (and VERY rich) homemade macaroni and cheese. My mom would yell, "Get out of the kitchen, now! You've had enough to eat!", but that didn't stop me from coming back when she was busy doing something else. I learned to wait until she was caught up with arguing with my father, which usually happened as soon as he walked through the front door. Yes, there was a connection. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Families these days are at an even greater disadvantage when it comes to trying to preventing food addiction and childhood obesity.  We didn't have the overwheming sensory overload of food commericials or the abundance of high fructose corn syrup and chemically additives in food like we did now. Couple that with the fact that many parents grew up eating even more of that  non-nutritional junk than I did, add that with the fact that they never learned to cook well balanced meals for themselves, you have the perfect recipe for childhood (and adult) obesity. A lot of parents probably don't realize this, but they are potentially taking 10-15 years off their kids' life span by feeding them all that junk. Unless they make a very determined effort to provide very nutritious meals with no processed ingredients in them, their children stand a good chance of developing nutritional deficiencies that could lead to obesity at an early age.

That's why I don't let my grandson watch television (and feed him the same food I eat), and I insisted on unleashing my critical analysis of food (and toy) commericials when my three children were growing up. Of course, they didn't appreciate it at the time. ("Mom, can we just watch T.V.?!!") But they know how to keep away from the Kool-Aid as adults, and I'm taking credit for that. :) Yes, they wanted to eat the junk food like all the other kids, and I did give in sometimes. But none of them had the horrendous problems with obesity like I did growing up. And I'm very grateful for that.

Fast food truths

An Open Letter from a Food Addict

With much love and sincere thanks to Al-Anon Family Groups, for pioneering the way to keep substance abusers and food addicts accountable for their actions.

I am a food addict. I do need your help, but not in the ways you have tried in the past. The best way you can help me is to leave me to my own devices. Believe me; I have a lot of them.

Don't lecture, blame or scold me. I know exactly what I’m doing to myself, even though I eat as if I will never get another meal. I berate and demonize myself almost every moment of the day about my obsession with eating large quantities of highly refined, processed sugar/flour/high fat food.

Don’t show me the latest magazine diet or clip out articles about obesity risks and weight loss treatments from the newspaper. I will thank you politely on some days, become surly and distant on others. But I won’t do anything more than glance at the clippings before tossing them in the garbage. Please don’t take it personally.

Do not buy me diet books; I’ve bought enough of them over the years. Do not get angry if you’ve noticed that I haven’t opened those books. I am sick. You wouldn't be angry with me for having cancer or diabetes. Food addiction is a disease, too.

Don't throw away my “secret” stashes of food when you find them; it's just a waste because I can always find ways of getting more.

Don’t hide the bathroom scale from me; I will find it. Or if I hide the scale, don’t put it out in the open again. I know this doesn’t make any sense, but there is nothing rational about food addiction.

Don't let me provoke your anger. If you attack me verbally or physically, you will only confirm my bad opinion abut myself. I hate myself enough already.

Don't let your love and anxiety for me lead you into doing what I ought to do for myself. Don’t bring me food, cook my meals, help me get dressed, or call my boss when I feel too depressed to get out of bed and ready for work. If you assume my responsibilities, you make my failure to assume them permanent. My sense of guilt will be increased, and you will feel resentful.

Don't accept my promises and solemn pledges to lose weight. I'll promise anything to get off the hook. But the nature of my illness prevents me from keeping my promises, even though I mean them at the time.

Don't make empty threats, as in you will send me to one of those fat camps or reality shows to force me to lose weight. I know you’re not going to do that, and the fact that you would even say that to me just compounds my shame. But if you do decide to do those things or anything else, stick to your decision. Do not let me talk you ought of it.

Don't believe everything I tell you; it may be a lie. I’m not going to Weight Watcher’s or start the latest magazine diet on Monday, and even if I do, I will only half-heartedly follow those programs. I will tell you that another family member or a friend ate all the entire box of cookies, the gallon of ice cream or the whole bucket of fried chicken. What I tell you about my eating may even sound plausible, completely rational. But my word can’t be trusted when it comes to food. Denial of reality is a symptom of my illness, and I am in so much denial that I don’t always see how much more weight I’ve put on. It’s unfair of me to require you to be in denial about my food issues the way I am. Moreover, I'm likely to lose respect for those I can fool too easily.

Don't let me take advantage of you or exploit you in any way. Love cannot exist for long without the dimension of justice. It doesn’t matter how much I yell, scream, cry or make you feel guilty. Don’t give into my overt or passive/aggressive machinations.

Don't cover up for me or try in any way to spare me the consequences of my addictive eating. Don't lie for me, pay my bills, or meet my obligations. It may avert or reduce the very crisis that would prompt me to seek help. I can continue to deny that I have a a serious problem with food as long as you provide an automatic escape for the consequences of my eating.

Above all, do learn all you can about food addiction and your role in relation to me. Go to Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) meetings when you can. Attend Al-Anon meetings regularly and adapt whatever they say about alcoholism and the alcoholic to food addiction and the food addict. Read the literature and keep in touch with Al-Anon members. They're the people who can help you see the whole situation clearly.

I love you.

Your Food Addict

Angela in OA

PHOTO: I'm at Bosch Baha'i School with the Rancho Cordova Baha'i community, about six months before I entered food addiction recovery. I may have weighed more than 306 pounds, from the way I look in this picture.

I can’t recall the exact month or day that this happened, but I know the season and the year—it was late winter, 1987 that I entered the rooms of Overeater’s Anonymous and stayed for a while. (For those of who are familiar with the traditions of 12 step programs, please be assured that I am not breaking my anonymity by revealing this because I am no longer a member of OA.) I had attempted to attend the meeting a few years before, but I wasn’t ready.

The entire experience seemed completely surreal to me, from the circle in which people sitting to the way they said “My name is Janice (or Susan or Betty) and I’m a compulsive overeater.” Why did they do that? And why the rest of the group keep saying “Hi, Janice (or Susan or Betty)” in response? Then there was what felt to me to be an interminable silence following the short testimony given by Janice (or Susan or Betty), which was quite uncomfortable to me. The silence lasted until another person raised her hand, and I felt like I could breathe again. I was hoping they didn’t want me to say anything because I had no clue what was going on. Besides, nothing I heard seemed to relate to the reasons I came to OA in the first place, which were: a) I wanted to lose weight and, for the first time in my adult life, live in a normal sized body; b) stop my then-husband from sleeping with other women by losing weight, since he told me that was the reason why he did it.

An aside pertaining to the letter “b” in the previous paragraph: I know this is a hot topic with many women, and I promise it will be the subject of another blog when I get enough serenity in my recovery to stop referring to my ex-husband as a “piss-colored bastard” and many other “choice” monikers that I have retained for him over the past 20 years.

Every single word coming out of the mouths of those OA members were incomprehensible abstractions to me. When it was over, I decided to ask a few of them some burning questions: “What is abstinence? Does it mean you just stop eating completely?” (The thought of that kind of abstaining from my best friend and lover, was terrifying to me.) The ladies smiled graciously and told me that the OA program suggested that they eat three moderate meals a day with nothing in between, avoiding white flour and sugar. Since I was well over 350 pounds at the time this made no sense to me. Did that mean that I could eat as four huge slabs of thick crust pizza for lunch and a plate filled with macaroni and cheese for dinner, as long as those items were made whole grain wheat? Yes, they responded. OA does not endorse any food plan, and what you eat is between you and your Higher Power. I liked that concept because it seemed to me that I would get to continue eating the foods I loved and still lose weight. If that program could do that for me, I was all for it. Eating whatever I wanted, even though it was supposed to be in moderation, seemed heavenly to me.

But the skeptic in me wasn’t convinced, so I asked them, “Is that how you all lost weight?” Again, they smiled. “Yes, that is part of it, but the program also promise release from the pain.” Inwardly, I scowled. What pain? What are you chicks TALKING about? But that’s not what I said out loud. “So what you are telling me is that if I eat three moderate meals a day with nothing in between, I will lose weight.” “You will, if you keep coming back. It works.” Well, none of them were particularly large; in fact, one lady looked down right skinny to me. Even more importantly, she told me lost eighty pounds by doing the three-moderate-meals-a-day-with-nothing-in-between deal, and kept it off for five years. That impressed me somewhat. I had reservations about whether I could do the same because I had a lot more than eighty pounds to lose. But for the first time in my life, I had some hope about what to do about the most difficult issue in my life, which was my weight. An idea was planted in my mind about recovery from OBESITY (versus compulsive overeating or food addiction), which was that I could lose the weight and eat whatever I wanted as long as it was limited to three moderate meals a day.

After all, as OA explained to me, my food plan was between me and my Higher Power, who is certainly powerful enough to change my body chemistry so that I would experience miraculous weight loss on that food plan. I was going to slide into home base, free and easy. Since I didn’t hear any objections from the heavenly realm, I proceeded to define moderation as a large dinner platter or bowl heaping with whole grain pastas and/or breads and cereal products with sauces, protein and fats. And I could have dessert, as long as it was made with whole grain flours and natural sweeteners, like honey, raw sugar, agave nectar, brown rice syrup or molasses.

Wow, where was Overeater’s Anonymous when I was suffering through that contemptible Armed Forces Diet! I would have been saved from all that agony! OA was, indeed, a miraculous program. The prospect of being able to lose weight without going through the horrible deprivation, mood swings and stomach growls, not to mention being able to eat food that actually tasted good, was extremely appealing to me.

“I lost weight WITHOUT dieting!” I heard some of the ladies in OA enthusiastically proclaim that, year after year. I believed them; they were living proof. But there was something very faulty about the way I translated those words while applying them to working my program. So I ate my three large feasts a day with nothing in between, avoided all refined white flour and sugar, went to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings faithfully each week, and waited for the miracle to happen.

To my dismay, I gained more weight. My body became overwhelmed with the very serious health consequences of carrying over 200 pounds of excess weight. After while, I could no longer work because walking for more than two feet at a time caused daggers of pain to sear through my lower back and left hip. I became wheelchair bound and mostly dependent of my family to get me around town for shopping and medical appointments. I came to realize that the three meals-a-day-without-anything-in-between and eating unrefined sugar and flour was not working for me. But what else could I do? I had tried everything, Weight Watchers, hypnotherapy, protein diets, liquid fasts, Nutri-System….you name it; I’ve done it. I even had Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery in 2002. That did work for a little while. But I began re-gaining the weight after I was one year out of the surgery. At that point, I became severely clinically depressed and placed on very strong anti-depressants under the care of a psychiatrist.

Another aside: My unofficial pre-gastric bypass weight is 400 lbs, which I can't statistically verify. At the time, I refused to get on a scale, and most bathroom scales didn't register weights over 300 lbs anyway. However, I was massive enough to bust the zipper on a pair of size 54 waist jeans, which I paid big dollars for from Irene's Sport Shop on Arden Way, Sacramento. Irene's is a specialty clothing store for large women that carries up to a size 8x. I wore a size 5x, and I was still attending OA meetings during this time. When I entered Kaiser Permanente's gastric bypass program a year later, I had lost about 30 lbs through CEA-HOW, which was another 12 step for people with food issues. In order to qualify for gastric bypass surgery, I had to lose another 10% of my body weight, so I went a strict vegan diet and lost 30 pounds. I weighed 331 pounds on the morning of my surgery, which July 11, 2002. My lowest post-operative weight was 235. I entered my current recovery program in October, 2007 weighing 306 pounds. I now weigh 183 pounds.

It has been one hell of a journey, but I’m no longer on that road spiraling downward. I'm now working a 12 Step program that addresses my particular brand of total insanity around food. I thank Overeater’s Anonymous for introducing me to the 12 Steps, but I am too far gone to work a loosely structured program like that. It works for some who don’t have the completely bizarre mental twists that seem to justify destructive eating behaviors, like filling up a dinner platter to an overflowing capacity and considering that mountain of food a “moderate” meal. And I thought I would lose weight by eating that way! Only an insane person would hold onto such delusional thoughts.

There are a lot of people like me who live every day of their lives in the same kind of delusions. They are FOOD ADDICTS.

Hi, my name is Angela, and I am a low-bottom, gutter level food addict.

A Family in need of serious intervention

Philip Chawner, 53, and his 57-year-old wife Audrey weigh 24st. Their daughter Emma, 19, weighs 17st, while her older sister Samantha, 21, weighs 18st.

(Angela's note: A stone equals 1.40 pounds; two stones are 2.80 pounds, and so on. So Philip and Audrey apparently weigh 336 pounds each. Emma weighs 238 pounds, and Samantha weighs 294 pounds. That's 1,162 pounds all together. That's a whole lotta "chips" going down right there!)

Family who are 'too fat to work' say £22,000 worth of benefits is not enough

A family of four with a combined weight of 83 stone say they are "too fat to work" and need more than the £22,000 (31,955.17 in US dollars, whoa, the British pound is pounding the mess out of the dollar!)they currently receive in benefits.
The Chawners, haven't worked in 11 years, claim their weight is a hereditary condition and the money they receive is insufficient to live on.

Mr Chawner said: "What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table. It's not our fault we can't work. We deserve more."

The family claim to spend £50 ($72.6322 US) a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day. The recommended maximum intake is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.

"We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner," Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine.

"All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight," she added.

Each week, Mr and Mrs Chawner, who have been married for 23 years, receive £177 in income support and incapacity benefit. Mrs Chawner is paid an extra £330-a-month disability allowance for epilepsy and asthma, both a result of being overweight.

Mr Chawner gets £71 a month after developing Type 2 diabetes because of his size. He was on a waiting list for a gastric band last year, but a heart condition made the operation unsuitable. Their daughter Samantha receives £84 in Jobseekers' Allowance each fortnight while Emma, who is training to be a hairdresser, gets £58 every two weeks under a hardship fund for low-income students.

Emma, said: "I'm a student and don't have time to exercise" she said "We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don't know how."

I've never read a story that screamed "FOOD ADDICTS IN NEED OF INTERVENTION, TREATMENT AND RECOVERY!" more than this one. It makes me sad. Yes, I was once too obese to work. I had all kinds of medical issues related to my weight. And most, but not all, have cleared up since losing 200 pounds. My other medical problems are caused by permanent damage done to my body through morbid obesity, which in itself is caused by being addicted to eating.

About three months ago, I was diagnosed with something called diffuse arthritis, which is a not-so-common form of degenerative arthritis. Calcium has built up along both sides of my lower vertebrae, and bone spurs have developed on my spine. There's no cure, and surgery is too risky. I just have to live with it. But even living with pain for the rest of my life is not going to stop me from being a productive member of this society.

My intention is to recover from food addiction, get a weight that is healthy for me (don't know what that is yet, and I don't worry about it), and become an increasingly productive member of society. I do not expect the government to continuously pay me for being sick. Right now, I do have a lot of medical risks that do interfere with my ability to work. But I look at this as temporary. I can't and won't become dependent of disability for a living. I'm grateful that I have worked enough to pay into the system, thank you God, and that my basic needs are being met right now.

But the issue is food addiction, as I see it. Obviously, the parents have passed on their eating habits to their daughters. Is there an "Intervention" type show over on the BBC like there is on A&E channel here? Can anyone get this family into some kind of treatment program so they can have productive, fulfilling lives? It's obvious that they are suffering from a problem that is far beyond their ability to control. Addiction of any type is serious, especially when the substance is food. We all have to eat, and in the Western world, food is literally everywhere--on television, the Internet, magazines, billboards, neon signs. Don't believe it? If you are a boomer, finish this sentence: "You deserve a ___ ___." Or, "Have it___ ___." I don't know what the current fast food ads are like because I refuse to watch them. Yes, I'm not neutral to them yet. So I have to protect my recovery by keeping the T.V. off and clicking away from food ads on the Internet.

So when food is so prevalent that we can literally collect pennies to get a 99 cents fix at Mickey D.'s (short of McDonald's, for those of you outside of the U.S.), people have an open highway leading to food addiction. That addiction "ON" switch can be easily triggered in the brain, and it will run amok very, very quickly. Question: How many of you have ever bought bags of sweets from Dollar Tree or the 99 Cents store and felt elated because you got ALL that "good stuff" for cheap? If you are a food addict (and you don't have to be obese or even overweight to be one), you probably felt like you had found a leprechaun's gold pot at the end of the rainbow. That is, until you devoured all of the shopping bags of candy, cookies and other stuff by the end of the night and you have a splitting sugar hangover and horrendous upset stomach. But that's ok, right? It sure tasted good, didn't it? You can't WAIT to go back and buy some more! Addiction, my friend, addiction!

The Chawner family may just have a genetic predisposition for obesity. My family does too, at least the women do. But it's not hopeless, and just like the Chawners (if they ever come to believe it), I'm not helpless. There is recovery for food addiction and its outward symptom, morbid obesity. I pray that they find it, soon.