Weight Problem | Dr. Sam

All the excuses in the book

As a practicing physician, I have heard and used all the stories and excuses in the book. When I was overweight, I made some of these excuses too.

Righteous indignation
My first tactic was to be angry that someone in my family or perhaps a friend or colleague would comment (with only the best of intentions, probably) that I was eating too much and the wrong kind of food at that.

I call that the righteous indignity ploy. I would, instead, criticize them. They were too vain I would tell myself. I was a man of "substance." Appearance was of little consequence to me.

My health is fine
My health? Nothing would happen to me. Only the next guy would suffer the effects of obesity, I believed. Still, while I was a professor in medical school, I was diagnosed with hypertension and it took three drugs to control my blood pressure. (With weight loss, I now require none!)

I'm not fat
Another rationalization was to fool myself into thinking that I was actually not fat at all. I would see myself in the mirror as someone else. I would suck in my gut and actually visualize myself as a different person. I would love it when my friends, hoping not to offend me, would call me "big framed." (My waist expanded to a mere 44-plus inches. My suit size inched up to a 52. I had to hunt with embarrassment for a suit that would fit me. (My waist is now a 33 and I wear a size 40 sport coat.)

There were days of being despondent as my girth crept up. I shuddered as a physician when a patient asked me about weight loss because I knew that I did not have the answer. How could I? I was more obese than many of the folks who sought my advice. I wondered why they even asked me.

It's my thyroid
There was always the patient who would say to me," I don't understand it, I hardly eat anything. Do you think it's my thyroid?" In rare instances there is a thyroid-deficient patient who shows up with obesity as one of the symptoms. But, by and large, it is not hormones but overeating and little or no exercise that causes the growing waist line.

How long can we whine about it?

Sure, the food industry should be more responsible. Sure, restaurants need to offer healthier fare. But suing a food chain for its crummy menus will not make you thinner. And all this begs the issue - you are still responsible for what you put in your mouth!

All this is a roundabout way of talking about the challenge we all face: our unwillingness to embrace the two common-sense solutions to weight loss: a determination to succeed, and a vast change in both our eating and exercise styles.