Angry
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Being over weight can be the cause of self loathing and anger as we are often made to feel that it is our fault we are fat and that we are to blame for bad food choices and under exercise. I have been angry at myself and the situation I found myself in having to avoid food that my body can no longer tolerate.
It is fair to say that processed food additives such as sugar and the many ultra processed non foods that now find their way into the vast majority of food that we buy in supermarkets and other food outlets are the cause of many of the health problems we face today. Subsequently non of these things should be considered food and we can legitimately remove these from our diets.
But food that I used to consider healthy, such as some vegetable and plant based food I have to limit as they often contain carbohydrates. Fruit for instance I limit due to high concentrations of fructose additional to sucrose and glucose.
I had thought that this was a result of my type 2 being brought on by the damage done to my body by years of consuming processed food and sugar. This may be true but I recently became aware of another factor at play in the makeup of our bodies and the way we process food in times of plenty and times of shortage.
It turns out that insulin resistance could be a wired in mechanism that helps us store fat when, in autumn time there are plentiful fruits in the form of berries and other fruits that are high in fructose. This is a time when we would have eaten as much as we could to store fat for the winter months when food would be scarce. Insulin resistance would kick in for some people more than others, but the ones that this happened to would have a better chance of survival through the winter months.
This would start to account for the difference between people I grew up around in that some would never seem to put on weight, where as I only needed to smell a pie and I would put on weight. In actual fact, I was probably insulin resistant to carbohydrates where as others were not.
Today however insulin resistance is on the rise, I believe due to the prevalence of ultra processed foods and the high carbohydrate content of the western diet.
Food production has been geared towards making volume at low prices with long shelf life and low cost. The side effect of much of the ‘non food’ that we eat making us quickly hungry has been a nice side effect for the food industry as we buy more and more of their products whilst they have been given browny points for making food cheap and plentiful.
I’m still fat. When I measure my waste circumference and compare this to my height, this works out at just over .5 so I still have visceral fat that I need to lose around my middle but I’m nearly there now. Plus, you can’t have been over 25 stone ( 350 lbs or 160 Kilograms ) and shrink your skin back to normal even in a few years. But I’m still considered over weight.
The message of hope here though is that body mass be it high or low, you are fat or thin is not itself a direct indicator of metabolic health. Some of us are genetically predisposed to be insulin resistant and some less so. Being over weight is something we need to address but not at all costs, forcing our bodies into starvation mode and yo yo dieting. Rather, we need to redress the balance of our diets and eat real food, not ultra processed food for our bodies to heal and for us to become healthy again.
This process can take place well before you meet with your ‘ideal weight’ and puts you in a much better position to maintain that weight once you get there. The obsession with weight, calories in, calories out and BMI is not helpful and can be damaging.
I am glad now that I did not, as some medical people wanted for me to, to undergo bariatric surgery or go into drug induced weight loss, either of which would have led to severe long term issues, despite short term results.
Now I understand a bit better why we have insulin resistance and that it can be a part of a survival mechanism, I am less angry with myself but there is no pardon for the food industry that has been allowed to get away with selling us non food for so long.
I hope this is of interest to you and if you are on a similar journey, I wish you well.