Teen Obesity and the Improper Solutions

I just read an article on teen obesity that was very irresponsibly written. It talks about teens that are turning to drugs and surgery for a solution to their obesity problem. One of the teens that the article focused on was s a 14-year-old boy who weighed 430 lbs. The article tries to lead the reader to believe that after serious attempts at diet and exercise, which failed, the only option left was having a portion of his stomach removed through surgery.

Let’s examine how absurd that whole scenario is. The boy’s mother indicated he was a chubby toddler leading to his teen woes. How does a toddler get to be chubby, I wonder. Oh…his mother overfed him, eventually leading to his teen woes. Weight gain and weight loss are relatively simple concepts. If you eat more calories than you burn, then you gain weight.

On the other hand, if you eat fewer calories than you burn, your body makes up the difference with stored energy, more commonly known as fat. Obviously, the teen ate abundantly more calories than he burned. Let me rephrase that. To get to 430 pounds at 14, he was not merely overeating. He was gorging himself. And again, who was giving him all that food? His mother then claimed he was not able to lose weight via diet and exercise. All of a sudden human physiology no longer applied to this teenager. People always claim that they tried diet and exercise to lose weight, but it didn’t work, and I say that it’s not possible. They only thought they dieted and exercised.

What’s disturbing is that society has adopted this hogwash that you can’t lose weight by dieting and that it’s some external force not allowing it. Society has decided to ignore science regarding the body and weight loss. I’m so sure of science and how it works in weight loss that if you locked that kid in a room and only fed him water to stay hydrated, he would be uncomfortable, but he would lose weight. Whenever I see disturbing photos of the German concentration camps showing the atrocities that took place, I never see a fat or even average weighted prisoner. They were starved of food, and everybody looked like it.

But we as a society have now determined human physiology does not pertain to weight loss. Weight loss is uncomfortable. I get it. Indulging and overindulging are far more gratifying than restraint. But the answer isn’t creating a separate reality. And the only people benefiting are the doctors and the drug companies that supply the drugs and services. You now have people thinking they need those to lose weight. Shame on us as a society.

Back to our teen.  Instead of eating less food, which can cause some uncomfortable feelings, especially hunger and the sensation of the stomach shrinking, he had surgery to remove part of his stomach. What did that do exactly? It prevented him from overeating by cutting down on the space for food to go. Isn’t that the same as just eating less without surgery?

Of course, it is, but the surgery requires much less discipline. Eating more calories than you burn to gain weight all of a sudden doesn’t work the other way. How could that be? The answer is it can’t. Consuming fewer calories than you burn has to lead to weight loss, and this teen proves that. However, instead of having the discipline to eat less food, he had a portion of his stomach removed. And what was the result of that? He had to eat less food because his stomach had less room to hold it. How more backasswards than that can you go about solving a problem?

So at the end of the day, what was the article’s real message? Shove as much food as you want into your gullet and when weight becomes an issue, simply go to the doctor and either have surgery or take drugs to compensate for your irresponsible eating habits.

And by the way, after the surgery, he lost 150 pounds. Now he’s a 15-year-old who weighs 280 pounds. In what world is that a “healthy” weight for a teenager?  It’s not but now he’s stuck.  He can’t have more of his stomach removed.  And unfortunately, he’s brainwashed into believing he can’t lose weight by simply controlling his intake