Do you smoke.smoke!

Geek, there is a huge difference between smoking and folks who have a serious weight problem. Smoking is clearly a choice that has been made by the person. Granted, you can choose to over eat or not eat right, and you can choose to exercise or not. However, weight MAY not be under a person's control. I read somewhere, but I don't remember the source, that if a person was more that 30? pounds overweight that there was a huge probablility that there was a medical condition impacting their weight. And the sad thing is that most doctors are biased against overweight individuals in the same way you are. I know this is from personal experience. For years and years and years I would go to my doctors and complain about weight gain and get the same ole tired advice, eat low fat, exercise more... nothing more, no questions about what I actually was eating, no questions about how much/what I was exercising, no questions about other symptoms, no lets do some tests to see if there is something going on. In other words they ASSUMED it was MY FAULT I was gaining weight (and from talking to other women with weight problems they have gotten the same treatement from the medical community, so it just wasn't my doctors). I finally got to the point where I would insist on tests but when the results came back outside of normal limits guess what the docs said? "It's not yet at a level I feel comfortable treating," or would just out and out lie and tell me the results were within "expected ranges." I finally became so disgusted with the 'medical gods' I stopped going completely and the extra pounds kept coming. By the time the doc of integrative medicine openned down here I was displaying about 95% of the symptoms of hypothyroidism and could barely get out of bed in the morning and would drag around all day because I had such a lack of energy. I decided to give intergrative medicine a try. Guess what? The new doc took one look at my records and said he couldn't believe I had never been prescribed thyroid because my tests had been coming back outside of normal range for years. So next time all of you folks out there see someone who is overweight don't be so fast to judge them. Their weight may not be their fault and they may have been trying to get help with it but have been brushed off due to predjudice and bias.

Geek, there is a huge difference between smoking and folks who have a serious weight problem. Smoking is clearly a choice that has been made by the person. Granted, you can choose to over eat or not eat right, and you can choose to exercise or not. However, weight MAY not be under a person's control. I read somewhere, but I don't remember the source, that if a person was more that 30? pounds overweight that there was a huge probablility that there was a medical condition impacting their weight. And the sad thing is that most doctors are biased against overweight individuals in the same way you are. I know this is from personal experience. For years and years and years I would go to my doctors and complain about weight gain and get the same ole tired advice, eat low fat, exercise more... nothing more, no questions about what I actually was eating, no questions about how much/what I was exercising, no questions about other symptoms, no lets do some tests to see if there is something going on. In other words they ASSUMED it was MY FAULT I was gaining weight (and from talking to other women with weight problems they have gotten the same treatement from the medical community, so it just wasn't my doctors). I finally got to the point where I would insist on tests but when the results came back outside of normal limits guess what the docs said? "It's not yet at a level I feel comfortable treating," or would just out and out lie and tell me the results were within "expected ranges." I finally became so disgusted with the 'medical gods' I stopped going completely and the extra pounds kept coming. By the time the doc of integrative medicine openned down here I was displaying about 95% of the symptoms of hypothyroidism and could barely get out of bed in the morning and would drag around all day because I had such a lack of energy. I decided to give intergrative medicine a try. Guess what? The new doc took one look at my records and said he couldn't believe I had never been prescribed thyroid because my tests had been coming back outside of normal range for years. So next time all of you folks out there see someone who is overweight don't be so fast to judge them. Their weight may not be their fault and they may have been trying to get help with it but have been brushed off due to predjudice and bias.