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May 2002 at 400 pounds

doctors don't consider Syndrome X a real condition.  And many consider Syndrome X to be caused by eating too much junk food and that causes the cells to become insulin resistant.

While surfing the net, I ran into a site that just listed studies on overweight and the results.  (I have searched for months and not found it again. If you think you know where this site is .please email the address to me at leonasbraincandy.com)  I read for hours and learned that recent genetic research shows people with Syndrome X are born insulin resistant.  I learned that the other problems associated with Syndrome X (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's. and stroke to name a few) are a result of the insulin resistance of the cells and the high insulin levels in the blood.

  Those of you who know Jay, please note he is in a tuxedo- a once in a lifetime occasion, and the reason the pictures were taken- to prove he had worn it.

   People who know me, know I spent a lot of time and effort dieting, and all it seemed to do was make me fatter.  That was a source of extreme shame to me,  and I felt worthless. 

  I never gave up trying to lose weight, So I kept  searching through the research on overweight, and during December of 2002, I ran into some research that changed my life.

  I had read a lot about Syndrome X, and had come to the conclusion that it described me.  A lot of

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August 2003 at 350 pounds

 Those few hours changed my life forever.  For one thing, being overweight wasn't my fault.  I didn't need to be ashamed.  It wasn't overeating or poor willpower.  In fact, the constant fasting and starving I had done over the years had triggered my body to store more and more fat until I was enormous. For two, my goal wasn't to lose weight anymore. but to change my blood chemistry.  I needed to reduce my carbohydrate intake to reduce the insulin levels in my blood, or else I would end up with diabetes or heart disease or worse

When the first picture was taken, I had just finished 6 months of eating less than 10 carbohydrates a day.  All that effort had caused me to lose twenty pounds.  It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.  I had loosened the diet considerably over the next seven months, but I was still exercising and doing all I could to maintain the weight loss.  I

   Then I read the information on the web, and realized I had to change my eating to low-carb forever.  So I started eating less than 10 carbs a day again.  To my surprise and joy, I lost 20 pounds by April- losing twice as fast as I had the year before.  That extra muscle mass made a difference.

     Through May and June I loosened the diet, eating more carbs so I could exercise more.  I considered this maintenance eating, so when I went to the doctor at the end of June and found I still weighted 368 pounds, I was delighted. The maintenance plan was working

  Surprise! Surprise!  My next doctor visit in July showed I had lost 18 pounds in one month.  I now weigh 350 on July 31, 2003. 

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Flax Seed

     Flax seed contains essential fatty acids.  They are called essential because the body will not function properly without them.  With all the hoopla about the need for low fat diets, we must not forget that a certain amount of certain types of fat are absolutely necessary for health.

While saturated fat contributes to obesity, cardiovascular disease, stroke and other degenerative diseases, flaxseed oil prevents and may even reverse these afflictions. For all intents and purposes we can think of flaxseed oil as the non-fat fat.

            The vegetable oils we eat provide omega 6 oils.  We also need omega 3 oils.  The best ratio in our diets is 1gram of omega 3 oils for every gram of omega 6 oils in our diet.  Unfortunately, the traditional American diet has one gram of omega 3 oils for every 20 to 40 grams of omega 6.  This imbalance leads to heart disease, cancer and many other problems.  Most sources of omega 3 come from fish sources and are very expensive.  Flax oil is inexpensive and a rich source of omega 3 oils.

            Not only is flax seed a good source of omega 3 oils, it is also full of antioxidants.  It has the highest level of lignans of any food.  The lignans in flax seem to have an anti-cancer effect.  When fed to women with breast cancer, the tumors of those who were given flax grew slower the tumors of the women who didn’t have flax.

            Additionally, flax activates brown fat.  People have two types of fat.  Brown fat is metabolically active and white fat is stored fat.  Brown fat helps control the metabolizing of brown fat.  When flax is consumed in the morning, it activates the brown fat and causes the burning of white fat.  For some reason, this effect is even stronger if the flax is consumed with yogurt.  Having flax every morning will increase your metabolism and cause your body to burn more fat.

            The best way to eat flax is freshly ground.  The body cannot digest the whole seeds.  Once it has been ground, it will go rancid within a few days at room temperature.  I use a coffee grinder and grind my two tablespoons each morning, mixing it immediately into my yogurt.  I have found the golden flax seed tastes best.  A good health food store will keep the fresh seed refrigerated, and so should you.

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Common Myths about Fat People

Myth One:        Fat people can lose weight easily if they would stop overeating.

 There are two myths in this statement.  One is the idea that fat people eat more than thin people.  Actual studies intended to prove overweight people eat more than thin people have shown the opposite.  Most fat people eat about the same number of calories per day as their thin friends, and many normally eat fewer calories.

            The other myth is that a fat person can starve himself thin.  In America, $33 million is spent annually on diet aids.  In spite of all the claims by the various diets and diet products, only 2-5% of dieters actually succeed in keeping the weight off.  For the rest of them, their bodies go into a starvation mode in which the body adds to the fat stores even while the person is dieting and losing weight.  As a result, most of the weight loss is muscle loss.  The loss of muscle reduces the metabolism and the person gains more weight even though eating less.  The body keeps adding fat to prepare for the next period of fasting.

Myth two:    Overweight causes heart trouble, diabetes and cancer

There is no actual evidence for this.  But there is a relationship, meaning fat people are more likely to suffer from heart disease and diabetes.  The numbers for the incidence of cancer among fat people has been slightly higher than among thin, however the difference is too small to be significant. (example: if a test of 300 people divided into two groups of 150 and the fat group had three cases of cancer, and the thin group had two cases, there is a difference, but it is too small to be significant).  The latest research on Syndrome X indicates the cause of both the overweight and the heart disease in Syndrome X sufferers is the elevated insulin levels in the blood, which eventually leads to diabetes. 

Actual studies show that fat people who stay physically fit and eat healthy food have a death rate very close to their thin counterparts who eat healthy and stay physically fit.  Those same studies show that fat people who are sedentary have much higher death rates, as do their thin counterparts who are sedentary.  Other studies have shown that fat people who work hard at eating a healthy diet have a lower death rate than those who don’t watch what they eat, even if the fat people never lose a pound.

Myth three:   If fat people lose weight, they increase their health and life spans

 It puzzles me that there are no actual studies that prove this.  It seems to me that it would be easy enough to follow people who had lost weight and check their health at regular intervals, or at least keep track of when they die. The problem of so few people being able to maintain weight loss could be part of the problem.

Now that many people are losing weight and keeping it off because of gastric bypass surgery, the lack of such studies seems even more puzzling.  The only study I have found gave great big headlines: ‘People who underwent gastric bypass surgery increased their life span.’  It looked good, and they had lots of numbers that looked good, too.  But upon further investigation, I discovered how the study was set up.  They never actually did any tests on the surgery participants, and didn’t even have them fill out questionnaires.   Instead, they took the weight of the people before the surgery, and weighed them again one year later.  Then they looked up life expectancies on an insurance table from the 1950’s, and deduced the people who had the surgery had added two to three years to their lives.  That isn’t scientific

It doesn’t make sense to me that no one would have done a study in this area.  I find it more likely that studies have been done, but the results were not what the scientists wanted.  But that may just be my paranoia.

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Attitude is Important

       As a fat person I tended to have a lot of negative emotions.  I felt ashamed when I ate anything that tasted good.   I was angry at my body for betraying me and getting fat, while other people ate the same things and didn’t get fat.  I was envious when I saw a thin person eating a piece of cake at a potluck or a party.   I was told by many sources that the overweight meant my spiritual life was out of harmony.  “The body is God’s temple and look what you have done to yours.”  There is a belief in the world that if you can make a fat person feel bad enough it will help them.  Believe me. I felt bad.  It didn’t help me lose weight. It did almost drive me to suicide.  I was so ashamed of my weight I wanted to die, to hide, anything.  I went on fasts and ultra low calorie diets in an attempt to punish this body I thought had betrayed me.

I felt bad.  It didn’t help me lose weight. 

   As an adult I had earned the respect and love of many people, so the issue of my weight was less important.  But even those people tended to treat me as if the weight was my choice.  Who in their right mind would choose to look like I did?  Some people did see how fiercely I struggled to lose weight, and they knew I was doing all I could to lose the weight and couldn’t succeed.  But even my loving pastor, who really did know, would preach against the sin of overweight, not the sin of gluttony. In his ignorance he would point to extremely large people as examples (while admitting that in a few cases it was genetic).  In fact, extremely large people are seldom gluttons- about 5% are, and they give the rest of us a bad name.

 I think doctor’s are afraid to tell people their overweight is genetic.

     Learning my overweight was genetic freed me from many of the negative attitudes I had, and I think that is part of why I am being successful now.  Being fat for me is the result of a birth defect, I don’t need to be ashamed of it any more than a cripple needs to be ashamed of needing a wheelchair.  Wishing I could eat like other people and stay thin was the same as a crippled child wanting to run normally.  It is a natural desire, but it aint gonna happen.  The sooner a disabled person accepts the disability and concentrates on therapy to improve what abilities are left, the better.  It was the same for me.  I had to stop feeling sorry for myself and accept the truth about my condition.  I was born with a serious disease called insulin resistance.  The earliest symptoms were high blood pressure and overweight.  If I didn’t start dealing with the disease, it would progress to heart disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and death.

I will have to fight fat and insulin resistance all my life. 

    There is no need to feel ashamed of an inherited disease.  I don’t have to wonder that there is some horrible thing in my subconscious making me want to be fat.  I am not committing suicide with my fork.  I am not hiding from reality or dealing with some vague spiritual unbalance.  I am not a glutton or a weak-willed person. My body hasn’t betrayed me.  It is doing the best it can under a terrible burden, and I have to learn to work with it not  against it.   I have a disease and I’d better find a way to deal with it

  Not everyone who has insulin resistance was born with it.  But it is just as much a disease if you contract it later in life.  And whether it is caused by the poor American diet or a virus or any other cause, it needs to be addresses as a disease, not a measure of your character.

It isn’t a diet, it is not allowing the condition to grow worse and kill you.

  The main thing I see is to stop eating all forms of sugar and everything made with white flour.  This is not a diet, This needs to be part of your daily life.  Just like a person allergic to peanuts has to avoid them forever.  Insulin resistance causes your body to release extra insulin when you eat refined carbohydrates.  That extra insulin does bad things to your arteries and causes you to gain fat, while preventing your body from burning fat.  So refined carbohydrates become a no-no forever.  It isn’t a diet, it is an essential part of not allowing the condition to grow worse and kill you.  Avoiding refined carbohydrates is the only way to stay alive.

      I think doctor’s are afraid to tell people their overweight is genetic.  I think they are afraid a fat person will think that makes it okay to eat anything they want without shame, and they will gain even more weight.  There are probably people who will do that.  But the truth is so much worse than mere overweight.  This disease is fatal, and even if I do succeed in reaching normal weight, I can never eat many refined carbohydrates.  You see, people believed the extra weight caused the problem, but overweight is only one of the symptoms.  The damage is done by the insulin, and if that isn’t kept under control. It will kill us, whether we are fat or thin.  The fat is an early warning that we are eating wrong.

I have been given a chance to live, but I will have to fight

   Just being alive with this condition is a thing to be thankful for.  In primitive cultures, this genetic condition is a two-edged sword.  In its early stages it improves survival. But as time goes on something happens. (maybe the gene mutates, or maybe having two parents with the condition changes things, I don’t understand everything I read in those research journals)  Each generation has a stronger insulin resistance and more problems.  Within a few generations, the woman with the condition either has all her children die in childbirth or she dies herself. And the gene no longer reproduces itself.  In our society, such children are routinely saved, and the mothers are, also.  In a primitive society, I probably would have been stillborn.  Instead, I have been given a chance to live, but I will have to fight fat and insulin resistance all my life.  I find myself thankful to be alive.

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    The news my weight problem is genetic freed  me from a lot of negative emotions that made my life difficult.  I am free from that emotional baggage now.   I can treat my overweight like a disease.  There is a lot of freedom in that. I may occasionally envy a person who can eat freely and not worry about weight gain.  Crippled people may envy normal people.  But that isn’t productive.  The solution for me is the same as for a person who is crippled:  Quit feeling sorry for yourself about what can never be and deal with what is.  You have a physical problem- deal with it.  Learn what makes your life better and make your life the best it can be.

         I may never become what our society considers a normal weight.  But I can lower my blood insulin levels and stop the disease from progressing.  I can make my life better, and be thankful for each day, knowing many children in third world countries with the same problem are stillborn, and I am alive.  I may be fat and have problems, but I am alive and I can love and enjoy and even weep and feel sorrow.  I am alive, and I can make today part of making my life better.

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