PJ, I think you are awesome, and your blog post was amazing. I think the main thing that has worked for *me* so far is totally getting into the mindset that I'm doing this for HEALTH. Previous attempts were always about weight loss alone, no matter what it took to lose it. So of course they were all doomed to fail. Am I still doomed to fail now? Who knows? As you say, the track-record for super-obese folks is not good. But the more I try to concentrate on health the better I feel about what I do.

I'm another one who finds the TDC weekly weigh-in depressing as hell. Yeah Judy is a wonderful success story! And for those who benefit from it, I'm glad it's there to help them. I certainly would never suggest it be removed either. But for me? Well at one point the TDC had a "monthly goals" thread. Maybe they still do, I stopped looking for it. But I joined in a few times in my early days here. Until I realized that I *never once* reached the arbitrary goal I'd set for myself. I began making the goals less and less lofty. I remember one month where I started the month at something like 291, so I set my monthly goal to get into the 280s. And when even THAT didn't happen I was getting so damn depressed I felt like throwing in the towel. But instead I just gave up on the monthly goals thread, and my mental health improved dramatically. The weekly weigh-in would be even more of the same thing only worse *for me*.
Yeah, healthy eating is the name of the game for me right now too. I do have a blog which I don't use every often. Mostly because I so rarely have anything useful to say. But my blog banner does state: " I do believe that food has the power to hurt and the power to heal. I have spent several years now trying to pursue the healing power of food, " because that's what it's really all about for me now. Trying to HEAL and be HEALTHY. And with it, the hope that a healthier body might be willing to drop a few more pounds.

But I'm also fully open to the idea that it may take more than food alone to heal. I think getting decent thyroid therapy over these last 6 months has helped me a lot also. Okay, I tend to be an optimist too. Or as my mother once told me when I was a teenager, "I'm sick of your goddamn Pollyanna attitude". But I think I temper it with some realism as well. I'm totally aware that I'm never going to have a fashion model's body, nor would I want one. But I still harbor the hope that I might get below 200 pounds at some point, and I don't think it's *totally* unrealistic, and would still fit in with your theory about a female being able to lose 200 pounds, +/- 20. So yes, I do still hope.

I really wish topics like this WOULD come up more often in the TDC. I think the TDC is a potentially great resource. I was really hopeful that it could be a place to talk about important issues for the very obese. We're all here to lose weight, true. But speaking as someone who started out needing to lose some 250 pounds to get to a "normal" weight for my height - well I just have different issues from the woman who weighs 137 pounds and would dearly love to get down to 120. I've even tried starting a few threads on the TDC, but most of them disappear pretty quickly.

My own feeling (and this is totally unsupported by anything but my own ideas and experience) is that the faster you lose the weight the more likely you ar to also quickly regain. I've been on this LC journey for 5 years now, and still slowly losing every so often. I keep hoping that the slow loss is actually a really good thing, and giving my body a chance to adjust - rather than a super-fast loss "shock therapy" and it's attendant frequent rebound affect.

Though as a type 2 diabetic I also find myself thinking more and more about looking into this Hmmmmmm......

Clearly no easy answers. Why did I become super obese, and my two sisters have both remained very slender life-long? I was the breast-fed baby, my sisters were both bottle fed. I was the skinny child, the child my mom's pediatrician accused of not feeding. I was the kid who was totally active, the kid who loved sports. The kid who always scored in the top 5% in the nation whenever we took the President's Physical Fitness Challenge tests.

But I'm the one in the family who became super-obese. The *only* one. No one else has ever been super obese or even close to it. No siblings, no parents, no grandparents, no great-grandparents, no cousins. I have one very small and skinny male cousin (5'6" and about 120 pounds) who does have a son, making him my first cousin once removed, who is 6'3" and about 300+ pounds. The only family member I can think of in my entire extended family who is heavy. My sisters are slender, every one of my first cousins is slender.

But I guess the predisposition to fat is there somewhere. My youngest sister, age 54, is 6 feet tall and about 135 pounds. And this is the "fattest" she has ever been! She is upset about her weight and considers 120-125 to be the "perfect" weight for her. But my niece, her 27-year-old daughter, is probably 200+ pounds at this point. It makes my sister hysterical and frantic. Her weight keeps creeping up year after year. Perhaps she is headed for being super obese. But she doesn't want to talk about weight or healthy eating or anything of that sort. But I can understand. I felt the same way at her age, though I was thinner then also, about 160 pounds. Which at the time I thought was enormously and disablingly fat. Oh how I wish .....

Hi Debbie,

Thanks, yep -- god only knows, but it does seem like there is a whole lot of stuff going on that is still "black box."

They've discovered, for example, one or more genes that very clearly code for alcoholism in native americans. Two people can sit down and have a drink and one that barely drinks now and then can become horribly addicted, and another that drinks like a fish still might not be years later. So, would it seem appropriate to apply the same "Quit whining and just use willpower to get your shit together" approach with both people? We could, but it would be inequal, to say the least. Would that mean that it's impossible for the first person to "quit whining and get their shit together" and successfully reform and stay that way? Not at all. It just means that when there is gene expression supporting an addiction, the % of people with that addiction is likely to be huge, and the % of people who can successfully address is likely to be small, and how "hard or easy" it is for a person to deal with that brain-response is definitely going to depend on genetics in that case.

I'm not suggesting that neuro-addiction is the cause of severe obesity (that would be putting it back into the calories equation which I do not believe). I'm suggesting that gene expression is probably setting why anybody's body "allows" them to gain only 10 pounds and then they have cancer or diabetes, or allows them to gain 400 pounds and then mysteriously they still don't have either, although the fat cell quantity starts causing its own separate issues. I suspect some body "mapping" in DNA evaluates what it's going to allow to fit into the map so to speak. I expect within that larger body-map setting, then things like insulin etc. become the numbers in the formula. But clearly it can't just be insulin at work since as noted, plenty of people grow up eating about the same and even from the same family and yet are dramatically different at some point.

Both my sisters (different father) are short (one is 4'11). 1 was fat growing up, but has been thin since adulthood. 1 was lean growing up, but has been mostly heavy to fat since adulthood (excepting early marine corps days (!), and in fairness, how much extra weight can you carry without looking fat when you're only 4'11?!). The lean one has basically been living on under-calorie'd dry toast and skim milk with cereal and bran and stuff like that since she was a teen (not sure if this, or if simply growing out of so-called babyfat, is why the change for her), and exercising like a hamster (she was manager of a Holiday Spa for a long time, and the aerobics/spinning queen). She has other issues, they just aren't about fat.

Meanwhile, the only issues I have are ONLY related to my excess fat. When I get back down to 370 or so (which I consider inevitable, though I also think it eventually returning again -- in a cycle -- is also possibly inevitable) it'll be ok again; I am ridiculously healthy aside from the fat element. Almost never ill, very strong bones even as a kid, very athletic and coordinated even when I was young, and up to about age 29 and 300# (to the degree possible at that weight since I was very sedentary at work and worked way too much -- but I still played tennis, windsurfed, kayak'd, etc. until I got married and pregnant, and it was after that, which I know in retrospect corresponds to a sudden major 'reaction' to gluten and sudden effects (though it was likely gradual) of sleep apnea (Low Oxygen: the #1 cause of obesity in ME at least... in part because it drives insane carbs-for-energy intake) that I gained another couple hundred pounds).

It's a stats game, and I suspect that major obesity is incredibly like the alcoholism issue. It's quite clear that the human body has setpoints on degree of fat it will even allow a person to accumulate, just from observing 'the world'. My cousin grew up eating crap, still eats crap, still is so skinny that she's been hospitalized twice because her bodyfat is so low her body wants to eat her organs and no, she is not T1 diabetic (the obvious first place to look in that case) either. Another cousin is the same except not sick, still thin, and lives on beer and pizza and big quantities of it (a man). I grew up eating crap, 'mostly' eat well now though definitely not always, and had a high weight of over 500#. It's not merely a matter of food-based-insulin in my opinion because I don't think either of their bodies would LET them reach this weight. I don't know what it is about our bodies that makes them operate so differently, but I am tempted to think it is more than 'just' food in the equation.

As my post said too, I think you're right about the body possibly reacting to the speed of fat lost, although I suspect it may also be reacting to the state of nutrient depletion and caloric intake as well. Who knows for sure.

Re: TDC, I find that one of the main differences in how people approach lowcarb (or whatever they're doing) is often geared to how long they have been doing it and what their results have been. Everyone, no matter what weight, tends to overdo it to begin with. Depending on the person and how much weight we're talking about though, that often gets them down far enough to really pick up working out for example, and they may be able to maintain that point. People who have been working an eating plan(s) for years but have not reached a so called normal weight, or in many cases who lost a lot of weight, but then regained, but then lost, but then regained... it changes how people view it -- eventually. I think eventually people start realizing that what they were doing wasn't working for them in the long run, and that focusing on health as an overall issue is probably better for them than focusing on carbs/calories.

But when people begin, that latter focus is important and a big deal, and believing you CAN lose the weight is often motivational and even necessary. I was very skeptical about LC when I first encountered it, and it was a long time before I tried it. I had a whole family of women who'd dieted nearly every day of their life on every imaginable plan and after 20-40 years they were all still morbidly obese. That is why, after my initial month of lowcal dieting when I gained ~200# in my 20's, I never dieted after that. It was pretty clear that this was not productive, and merely led to decades of angst and misery and neurosis. Now, if I had known about low-carb and bodybuilding I think I could have dealt with that initial weight gain or at least part of it and been vastly better for it. Although I gained about 75 pounds over the next 12 years, this is with not dieting at all and often working every waking hour and not sleeping enough, and is not a lot of weight per year. I didn't add another ~200# until the whole gluten/apnea/sleep-deprivation/megastress element came back into my life (the latter two were involved in the first big gain cycle).

Anyway, I ask myself, when I had begun, if someone had told me, the most you're likely to lose will leave you at about 300# (which at the moment I'd be damn happy for mind you), would that have demoralized me? Discouraged me? I think so. Maybe it was necessary I had unrealistic expectations to begin, in order to get me to begin in the first place.

The body changes. Lose 150# and the body is not the same body you started with, plus it is in 'reaction' to what you just did. So part of this is not just about being super fat, but about the fact that possibly no eating plan is going to work 'the same' for someone when they begin as when they have lost a lot of weight -- it might just be that the more weight we're talking about, the more extreme that situation.

PJ

It occurs to me that I'd look into supplemental oxygen; how's your sleep now?

I'd definitely say that my own body over-reacts to food with a tanker of insulin; probably why I do well with 2 big meals a day and a strict no snacking policy. And have the absolute least hunger problems of my whole adult life.

PJ-
Thank you for this post, and for putting it in the War Zone instead of the TDC.
PJ, I think you are right. I don't think it is about willpower at all, or determination, or the 'unconscious". I think it it biological.
I don't know what the issue is, but there is so much we just don't know about the human body. And like GT and Dr A and others have shown, sometimes what we think we know for sure is just wrong.

I have such respect for you-= been reading your posts for years- and I thin your new way of eating for health is great. You are making a very strong statement of your self worth: You are worth eating healthy, taking care of yourself. Just okay to literally nurture yourself.
Thanks -
E