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Background on Obesity2Balance
Congratulations! You are moving from obesity 2 balance with your body!
As you move from obesity to balance, you need to understand how the body achieves balance.
Energy homeostatis is the scientific name for the delicate physiological balance of food consumed and energy expended. In obesity, this delicate energy balance is severly disrupted.
This imbalance may be casued by a complex matrix of possible problems, with a different combination of factors for each person. This matrix includes the interplay of heredity, environmental, dietary habits and customs, physiological and biological issues.
No wonder studies show that 95% of morbidly obese people who lose weight non-surgically regain the weight they lost -- sometimes, regain more than they lost.
Our endocrine system is in charge of this delicate balance of energy consumption. (Just as an aside, we know more about the moon than we do about the endocrine system.)
Our bodies are fine-tuned, driving machines. If you eat an extra 100 calories or don’t burn up an extra 100 calories a day, you’ll gain 10 pounds a year. This translates into a small shift from a Diet Coke to Regular Coke at lunch. Or perhaps, you follow the advice of the department of transportation to begin working at home only to find the extra steps you saved by staying home caused you to add to your girth.
When the endocrine system is out of balance, the drive to fuel the body is job number one. Believe it or not, every cell in the body gets the message you are on the verge of starving to death. The hormonal call to action goes out – eat, stock up and pack it in. Will-power is not enough to fight off the physiological drive to survive.
Obesity is not an issue of will power or self control. Folks who struggle with obesity face society’s “fat prejudice.” Fat prejudice emphasizes misguided beliefs about will power - “Well, just push away from the table.”
90-95% of severely obese folks fail to lose their excess weight with conventional diet and exercise. This means our traditional wisdom about weight gain and loss is wrong. Obviously something else is going on in the body other than what science has previously thought.
Humiliating criticisms both verbal and nonverbal are the daily fare of folks who suffer with obesity. The consequence of being bombarded with negativism is that you begin to believe what you hear. Physicians can be frustrated because their healing skills don’t work; people are yammering at you to, “Just put the fork down”; and the folks struggling with obesity are feeling helpless and hopeless.
Gastric by-pass surgery or weight-loss surgery (WLS) is a successful mechanical/surgical method of altering the energy homeostasis. Medicine has nothing else that works as well for managing morbid obesity.
However, the physical system is not the only cause of obesity. To achieve and maintain life long weight maintenance, you need to get all systems in balance. Surgery is a tool that gets folks back on track, but the whole complex matrix needs to be in balance, too.
Obesity2Balance represents the movement from obesity to a healthy life in balance with your weight and full of vitality – living well!
We want you to have the skills you need to have a healthy life!
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