Declining Life Span In Women Confuses Scientists - Not Me

I just saw this news report this morning and just shook my head in disbelief:

Study shows declining life span for some US women
Mar 4, 4:07 PM (ET)
By MIKE STOBBE

NEW YORK (AP) - A new study offers more compelling evidence that life expectancy for some  U.S. women is actually falling, a disturbing trend that experts can't explain.

The latest research found that women age 75 and younger are dying at higher rates than previous years in nearly half of the nation's counties - many of them rural and in the South and West. Curiously, for men, life expectancy has held steady or improved in nearly all counties.

The study is the latest to spot this pattern, especially among disadvantaged white women. Some leading theories blame higher smoking rates, obesity and less education, but several experts said they simply don't know why.

I know why, and so does any fat woman in America today. There's a whole blog out there describing the treatment we get when we go to doctors with our medical complaints.  Everything is blamed on our fat. If we are above the "normal" BMI we're not taken seriously, and the treatment for our complaints is always "lose weight," whether we present with a broken arm or chest pains. 

Read the blog First, Do No Harm if you don't believe me. "Normies" will be aghast at the treatment those people received at the hands of their doctors while fat people will nod their heads and say, "Yep, that happened to me, many times." I can add a few stories of my own if I wanted to, most notably the cardiologist who told me I had a heart attack when I didn't because, he admitted, he thought hearing that would scare me into losing weight. Nice, especially when the cardiac problem I DID have was the result of the extreme stress I had in my life at the time. He didn't think the fat lady would have copies of all the tests he ran that showed what I did or didn't have so he couldn't bullshit me. He got mad at me when I refused to see his friend, the head of the bariatric surgery department of the hospital, for a consultation. And even though I had the lab work in my hands that proved it, he didn't believe I was following a very low fat, whole foods, plant based food plan prior to my hospitalization, because "vegans aren't fat."

These people in the study didn't die of obesity but of neglect and malpractice. There are thousands of doctors out there like that cardiologist.

People like those doctors make women afraid to see a doctor when something really is wrong. Women have died of heart attacks and ruptured aneurysms, ruptured appendices, various cancers, etc., because they were afraid to see their doctor when they had pain, because they knew it would be blamed on their weight and not given any diagnosis or treatment, so they lived with the symptoms. Until they didn't.

And what about the fat people who believe what their doctors tell them, that their fat is the cause of their ills, and go through desperate measures to get rid of the fat and die as the result? Women who take unsafe over-the-counter stimulants to "boost their metabolism." Women who over exercise and undereat and overstress their bodies which may lead to sudden death from heart attacks or electrolyte imbalances. Women who ingest tapeworm tablets. Women who have their healthy intestines and stomachs amputated in hopes that less digestion leads to weight loss. You know, weight loss surgeries. These procedures rob the body of needed nutrients, which lead to all sorts of medical problems, and for many, early death, earlier than if they just stayed fat in the first place. And don't forget those who die on the operating table or within the first 48 hours. Those are the only deaths counted as caused by the surgery itself. Statistics aren't kept on those who die months or a few years later from all the complications even if they're from the surgical procedure, such as ruptured suture lines, infections at the suture site that never healed because the body doesn't have the nutrition to defend itself, leaking of gastric material into the abdominal cavity from internal sutures or staples that weren't done right or ripped, etc. Those deaths are attributed to the person's fat, not the surgery.

On the opposite end of the weight spectrum are the anorexics and other women with eating disorders. The treatment failure rate is high, and many times leads to unnecessary deaths, all because they feared getting fat.

And let's not forget the young Type 1 diabetics who skip their insulin, not because they're tired of injecting themselves or have a death wish, but because they know insulin improves the metabolism of the food they eat, which leads to weight gain, so if they don't take their insulin they'll lose weight. 

Some women will do anything to lose a few pounds, even risk death. And scientists wonder why the death rate is going up in "certain" women, especially obese ones! Just look at how society treats us and they'll know why!

How I Feel After 3 Weeks of the Flu

Thanks, I Can Has A Cheezburger

The Fantasy of Being Thin

Google it, the "Fantasy of Being Thin" - you'll find hundreds of sites telling you that you don't have to be thin(ner) to get what you want out of life or even be healthy. I believed it for a number of years, getting heavily involved in Fat Acceptance, the Health at Every/Any Size Movement, all the fat and "intuitive eating" blogs and forums and mailing lists, including Overcoming Overeating. I really, really want to believe in it all.

But I've been having a heck of a hard time.

Yes, for a lot of people, and for me for many years when younger, it IS possible to be perfectly healthy with an abundance of pounds on the body, including being double or more of what the height/weight charts say you should weigh for optimal health.

Then I got older. My previously perfect lab numbers started changing for the worse, no matter how I changed my daily diet (no-added fat, plant strong, the diet President Clinton and Rosie O'Donnell *said* they were doing then slid off of). Unlike them, I don't add oil or eat fish - I follow the food plan 100% about 99% of the time and HAVE been for a number of years, long before Forks Over Knives. While other people started dropping their weight like sweat off a fat lady in August (Yeah, like ME on even a warm day in winter), I'm still fat, and even gained a few pounds over the years, and although my lab numbers got a bit better they didn't get that much better. Every nutritional expert I consulted with told me I have to lose weight before those numbers will improve any more, and not the "5 pounds make a big difference" weight loss, but at least half my body size type weight loss.

It's not like I haven't tried, but what more do they expect me to do? Eat less, move more. Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing that since infancy, when my formula was watered down because I gained 3 pounds overnight in the newborn nursery. I was on calorie restricted diets as a baby, toddler, child, pre-teen, teen, young adult, and middle-aged adult. I'm now approaching my senior years and still hear the same tired spiel.

I want it to stop. I want to be left alone.

Many Terminal Cancer Patients Put False Hope in Chemo, Study Finds

Many Terminal Cancer Patients Put False Hope in Chemo, Study Finds

I wish my dad had known this when he was in his last year of life instead of him and my step-mom spending ALL their savings AND taking out a loan to pay for his experimental chemo (ran through all the routine chemo drugs) that gave him just a few extra months of life, all of them suffered in agony with bone-wracking pain and shortness of breath so severe he could no longer eat.

Some People Get Crazy Over Blood Sugar Tests

Who in the world would complain about a fasting blood sugar of 85?? 

Why are they calling themselves "diabetic" if a 1 hour post-prandial blood sugar reads 130?? No, not a doctor, self-diagnosed. 

 Why are men of 5'7" or so calling themselves "fat" at weights below 110 pounds??? 

Why are these same people wondering if "something is wrong" when they get hungry 5 hours after eating a meal of 2 pieces of fruit then going to the gym for a 2-hour workout????
 
Has the whole world gone crazy or just the corners of it that I peek into?

Late December Update

Latest lab work - chemistry, blood count, etc. - showed just about everything is perfect. No diabetes, or even the hint of it, no anemia, no liver problems due to meds. My Vitamin D is now *just* in the normal reference range at 31 (normal 30 - 100) so my dosage is increased again to 5000 mg 5 times a week instead of 3.

The past few months I haven't been sticking to any strict food plan, although I would say 90% of my meals are low fat, starch-based vegan. That other 10% includes the occasional fast-food burger and fries, pizza once or twice, even a Blimpie here and there. And yeah, all my lab work is fine! Because of that, I'm going to continue to eat this way and not feel so guilty about it.

Guilt. About eating foods the rest of the world eats without worrying about, like water-packed tuna and low-fat mozzarella cheese. I wrote about this over on the new Overcoming Overeating forums. You should take a look at the newly re-vamped OO website - lots of bells and whistles but the forums are the only thing new. But I love forums, so it's a big plus for me.

The elderly relative I've mentioned in the past is still sinking physically and mentally. She's only out of bed an hour or so a day, and even then she prefers to sleep rather than eat or participate in any activities. I was told she even sleeps through the children's choirs who have been streaming in on a fairly steady basis all month. Her bedsores aren't healing, she's still anemic and they can't find out why. She doesn't even wake up when we visit any more, just groans and tells us she's tired and is going to go back to sleep. The staff is at a loss as what to do next for her, and they even discontinued her physical therapy because she refuses to allow the therapist to even do range of motion exercises while in bed. All the appetite stimulants are doing are giving her a sweet tooth, and all she's eating are the pastries and donuts that are part of each breakfast, rarely anything else.

At least her house has been sold so there's enough money in her bank account to pay for her nursing care for a few more years.
 

So this is how we're entering Christmas week and the end of 2011. I hope 2012 is better. Right now we're all hoping it WILL bring the end of the world with it!

Frustrated and Bored

 I found this old post sitting in my Drafts folder, the original date back in early September.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I know I've written this probably hundreds of times already, but I'm so frustrated at lack of weight loss and so bored with the bland meals I've been making.

New labwork shows that my thyroid replacement med is at the correct dosage (Doc doesn't care that I still have every symptom of hypothyroid, including a pulse in the 40's). No Hashimoto's disease. No liver problems. No parathyroid disease. But the labs DID show my vitamin d level is plummeting, something it shouldn't do in summer sunshine months, and a positive ANA, which may mean lupus. (sigh)

And what to eat? I had a few lapses in the low-fat vegan food plan, mostly because of being away from home for a good part of the day unexpectedly while caring for the elderly aunt with Alzheimer's disease (Who was finally admitted to a nursing home just 3 weeks ago), and a recent partaking of green smoothies, which are high in fruit as well as greens, which raised my triglyceride level. My HDL went down a bit, LDL went up a bit. But those lapses were no more in number or different from food consumption from previous lapses before other lab tests.

I also gained about 6 pounds in the 6 months between visits.

After getting the lab results I tweaked the food plan a bit to provide for blander, more boring foods. The idea was to make food so unpleasurable I won't eat so much of it. At least that's Dr. McDougall's philosophy - monotonous meals means less pleasure from them so you naturally eat less of them. Of course, it backfires. If a food is not tasty I still eat it, then go in search of better tasting food and eat my fill (or over-fill) of that to get the memory of the monotonous food out of my memory.

So I started eating even more off program foods. Cheese and roast beef sandwiches have had a particular pull. Or more higher fat/salt choices of on-plan foods, like nuts and stews.

And of course, every other web forum I go to tells me to run away from the starch based plant food diet as fast as I can, to avoid gluten, avoid starches, if I want to ever lose any weight. A few cardiologists' sites even say it's better to eat low fat dairy and meats than whole grains and potatoes. Are they trying to drum up business for their professions? They all offer links to as many peer-reviewed articles proving their way of eating is perfectly healthy, that meats and most fats don't raise cholesterol and people haven even lowered their cholesterol levels on their food plans; either that or they say cholesterol levels have nothing to do with cardiovascular health. They, too, show cardiograms with arteries clearing after a week weeks on their diets, just like Ornish and Esselstyn do.

I'm Gonna Live Forever!

Slow metabolism linked to longevity

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Joel Fuhrman

 

An excerpt from the middle of the article:

 

Metabolic rate and lifespan
A study on thyroid function published last year further supported the idea that a slower metabolic rate could prolong lifespan.  Now, a new study has measured resting metabolic rate directly and come to the same conclusion. 

My daily exercise for the past 2 weeks has consisted of a 2-mile Leslie Sansone video, 5 minutes using the MagneTrainer for upper body work, then again for a minimum of 30 minutes in my target heart range as a recumbent exercise bike. It's been a great work out, getting my heart rate up there and making me sweat prolifically.

Then the leg pains started. First it was just above my ankle, and I blamed the shoes, the boots I wore outside to view the aftermath of "snowmageddon", or just too tight socks. But after switching shoes and making sure I never took a step without them, doing better stretches, even changing the type of socks I wore, the pain is now not only in the ankle but in the shin of my left leg. Damn! When this happened to me in the past my podiatrist told me to cut back on those higher impact aerobics. He already told me to not do so many walking exercises because of my deformed and arthritic feet but I liked the way they made me feel afterwards, and face it, those Leslie Sansone workouts are just so simple to do that a klutz like me can follow along with ease.

But now I have to back off a bit or the pain and damage will only get worse.

Today, instead of any of that fast or foot-pounding stuff, I pulled out my Francesco and Daisy Garripoli beginners qigong DVD, and aside from tired feet from all that standing in one place, I think I got a very good workout, full of gentle movements but some just enough to get my heart rate up a bit — nowhere near my target heart rate but at least elevated. It was nice, returning to this not-so-old favorite. I just bought it a few months ago, before my heart thing, and stopped using it afterwards when the cardiologist insisted on me doing only cardio workouts, with weight loss as the main goal, even though the cardiac rehab nurses not only approved of me doing qigong but suggested I do the cardio one day and do the qigong on alternate days, that doing cardio 7 days a week really isn't healthy or sustainable, especially with my history of various arthritic spots, neuritis, and degenerative disk disease in my spine.

In the old days, I would have just not exercised until my left felt better. My, how times have changed!

Although I said I was going back to strict McDougall, it was more like 50-50 instead of my usual 90-10, and my body is paying for it with all kinds of aches and pains, blood sugar dips, brain fog out the wazoo, and now my blood pressure is higher than it ever was. I had a nice McDougall soup for dinner last night and every 2 hours had to get up to hit the bathroom. At 3:30am it hit again and I rolled over and stood up and WHOA!

The room started spinning!


I immediately sat back down and started to panic, even though this has happened to me in the past, and thanks to my very sensitive inner ears, will happen again in the future. But at the time, the tailspin of panic sent my blood pressure soaring to 210/104, stroke levels. I eventually calmed myself down enough to go to the bathroom (or else I would pee in my pants and panic me even more) and got back to bed, but by then sleep was out of the question. By 4:30am the dizziness was completely gone, my pulse rate was back to normal, and my chest no longer felt as if were going to burst open from the force of my heart beat. It was at this time I got out of bed and checked my blood pressure and got that reading - who knows how high it was back when my head was spinning?! I've been checking it every hour as the morning goes on and the last reading was back to my normal of around 140/70. Whew!

But what, besides rising too fast, caused the BP to go - and stay - that high? My money is on yesterday's bad food choices, as there were more bad than good ones. For breakfast I finished off the hash brown patties that were in the freezer. That was 6 patties. With about a half cup of ketchup, and not a lower sodium variety, either. Lunch was a balogna and cheese sandwich, and not a lower sodium version of the lunch meat. Dinner was a little something called Paul's 2-Cup Soup from a post on the official McDougall forums that I made with no salt added tomatoes and salt-free broth, thank goodness. But to go with the soup I made a loaf of white flour potato bread that got not just buttermilk powder in it but 4 teaspoons of butter. And because veggie soup and white bread digests fast, when I was hungry again a few hours later I had myself a banana with peanut butter.

Now, why is my blood pressure sky high? Do I really need to ask that question?

Breakfast today was my old-faithful oatmeal & raisins with some brown sugar mixed in. Lunch will be veggies, rice and garbanzo beans with some McDougall Right Foods pea soup poured over the top. Dinner is going to be a McDougallized version of Nava Atlas' Pasta Twists with Cauliflower and Spinach, using California Blend frozen veggies (cauli, broccoli and carrots) instead of the plain cauliflower, and no spinach, mainly because I was positive I bought spinach but the freezer ate it sometimes between Saturday and today. My son was happy about that because he really doesn't like spinach all that much. And if I want a snack tonight, well, I'm thinking of making another banana bread. Maybe this time my husband will leave enough so we can have it more than twice.

I keep saying I have to treat my food plan as if it were medically prescribed, like my thyroid and asthma meds. It's the only way it'll sink in to this swollen throbbing brain.

The World Is Spinning By

First of all, I'm sick. It started coming on a few days ago, that sinus yuckiness, the congested and fuzzy head, poor sleep. Yesterday it settled into a full blown sinus infection, complete with the aggravated tinnitus and weird smell in my nose. I'm also a bit on the dizzy side today. A double dose of dizziness - the changing air pressure always makes me dizzy and sinus infections do, too. I'm sitting here at the keyboard holding on because I'm listing to the left with these clogged ears affecting my equilibrium.