Flagg wrote:Got a percentage that are fat due to causes other than eating too much of the wrong shit without exercsising? Not being a smartass, am actually curious.
I don't have percentages, but I do have a few medical facts for you to consider:
1) It is harder for women to lose weight than it is for men. This is because women's bodies are "programmed" to carry a higher percentage of body fat than a man's body, in no small part to ensure that a woman will be able to successfully carry a fetus to term (I have a sister who actually
lost weight between the time of conception and time of delivery due to a serious illness - the baby was born normal weight because she had sufficient calories "on board" in the form of body fat to sustain the baby for those months she was too ill to eat adequately to maintain her weight). This difference becomes even more pronounced after a woman has been pregnant and given birth.
2) Thyroid disorders can really make it hard to impossible to lose weight. There are a couple other glandular disorders that can also fuck up weight control. Someone with a thyroid dysfunction may have a much lower than normal metabolism meaning a diet sufficiently low in calories to actually lose weight may not be sufficient for nutrition. That's a bit extreme, true, but really,
anyone with a "low thyroid" will find it MUCH harder to lose weight than someone without the problem. The doctors do true to compensate with artificial thyroid hormone but it's not as good as having a properly functioning thyroid and they will, if anything, tend to set the replacement slightly low rather than slight high as too much thyroid hormone can fuck you up even worse than being merely overweight, including a charming phenomena called a "thyroid storm" which can leave you dead. The news anchor in question does, in fact, have a thyroid disorder. She almost certainly
really does have a harder time losing any weight at all compared to a person without thyroid problems.
3) Anyone on a corticosteroid for a long period of time is going to have a weight problem. This includes a lot (though not all) people with organ transplants, people with autoimmune disorders including fun things like lupus, and folks with severe asthma or life-threatening allergies.
4) A number of anti-HIV drugs fuck up fat metabolism. This results in too much fat in some places and not enough in others, leading to some pretty freaky-looking people sometimes.
5) There are genetic disorders that predispose to obesity. Some are familiar, like Down's Syndrome, and some less so, like Prader-Willi Syndrome. While not
everyone with those syndromes will be obese these unfortunates really do have a problem of lower-than-normal metabolism
even when athletic and appetites ranging from normal (such as in Down's) to the obscene (Prader-Willi, where the "full" mechanism doesn't exist. These people are NEVER not hungry, their appetites are locked permanently into "I'm starving" and no amount of food will satisfy.)
Now, I don't know the percentages of people who suffer the above, but they all certainly do exist, and in most cases you can't tell just by looking at them that they have one of the above problems (Down's being an exception). So yeah, some people really do have more trouble losing weight than the average person, and a person with two or more of the above (such as woman + thyroid problem) is going to have it even worse. Does that excuse every overweight person? Certainly not. Does that mean it's OK for an of the above to give up/quit trying? No. However, do understand that this newsanchor, being both female and having a thyroid problem
really does have a harder time losing weight than a healthy young man such as, for example, Flagg.
