@AndBreathe
I live in the US & I see the adverts on TV all the time. The one for Farxiga is particularly obnoxious for me. Dire Straits "Walk of life" is the background music to a bunch of happy smiling faces literally walking about in a park. What is implied is that diabetes is a "Walk in the park". This advert is horrendous and is about selling drugs not about making one aware of correcting a potential problem.What many don't consciously get is that an obese BMI puts the chances of getting T2 up 60 fold.
I have specifically pointed out that neither I nor did the 5 physicians I had seen over the previous 4 years made me aware of the connection between my growing BMI and the chance of my attaining T2DM.
In fact when I got my first full blood workup my internist, who had the info of an HbA1c of 6.5% in his hands, didn't recognize that I had T2DM! The INTERNIST didn't diagnose me as a T2! That was my US doctor, and the fact in my situation. So if my internist with blood work showing HbA1c at 6.5% & a fat guy stood in front of him can't diagnose T2DM what hope have we as a society? He thought I needed to see a back surgeon! We are bombarded with diabetes adverts yet a trained internist doctor can't diagnose T2 with blood work showing T2? Come on! It is because of this that I want to share my experience, that I fell thru the HCP support system of catching me pre-diabetes & failure to recognize T2DM too. Crazy.
I was obese at diagnosis but I prior to diagnosis couldn't find the tools to lose the weight. The real motivation came from the pain of the neuropathy.
What I find incredibly interesting in this discussion is I sense that bullets are being fired at myself the messenger of how bad T2DM is and no bullets being fired at BIG Pharma for not supplying the fix! When Ebola was raging in West Africa Big Phama did step up finally and find a fix of sorts. Diabetes is an epidemic. Sticking our heads in the sand will not make the problem disappear..
I have an interesting problem that anyone can chime in on. I know of a different person in their twenties who goes to my church and by looking at them I can see that the person is clinically obese. Applying that to the knowledge I learned this morning that being obese gives rise to 60 times more chances of becoming T2DM, what does you all do? Do we behave like the "Good Samaritan ?" Or does one walk away?
In truth I am the messenger I am not the disease.
This is my last comment on this topic because I feel I am wasting my time. It sounds as if we will never agree on your evangelical approach to this young woman’s condition.
I’m not going to touch on the competency of your multifarious advisors or their obligation to point out the health problems associated with obesity. We all know that obesity is one of those “generally bad” situations, because it increases the individual’s potential to suffer from any or all of the following, and of course the list is not exhaustive:
Diabetes
Cardiovascular Disease
Cancer
Depression
Reproduction
Respiratory Disease
Memory, & Cognitive Function
Musculoskeletal Disorders
Other Conditions
Mortality
If they had highlighted any of those things, can you honestly say, hand on heart, you would have immediately gone and lost weight?
Of course, I can’t answer that for you, but for most people, their response might have been to nod to their physician and say they’d lose weight, then toddle off back to their normal day-to-day lives. Maybe try for a few days, but at the first encounter with potato chips, ice cream, or the individual’s particular “fix”, revert to their previous norm.
Actually, you have highlighted the key to all of this yourself, when you said, “…. I was obese at diagnosis but I prior to diagnosis couldn't find the tools to lose the weight. The real motivation came from the pain of the neuropathy…..”
The absolute truth is that each individual needs their own motivation to change their lives. That can be a significant health diagnosis. It could be the breakdown of a relationship. It could be perceived discriminatory blockers in a career situation. It doesn’t matter what that trigger point is, but it’s individual, and unlikely to be a “this bad thing might happen in the future” sort of thing.
How many people do we see arrive on this site, saying they have been told to lose weight, but they just know they can’t because they’ve been trying for years, if not forever? How many smokers do you know who would love to give up, but just can’t? It’s amazing how many former smokers who “gave up, just like that” you will find in cardiac or respiratory units, having suffered the consequences of their previous bad habits.
Those individuals aren’t necessarily weak. They were simply never quite motivated enough to stick with it when the tricky times came along. Suddenly the “Why should I stick with this?” question had a clear answer, with a serious potential consequence.
So, bottom line is, this young woman needs to find her own trigger point.
Maybe she never will. Maybe something bad will befall her, but she may be one of the many, many obese people who seem to survive and function well, if physiologically sub-optimally.
I’m sure your desire that she doesn’t experience what you have is genuine, but in this world, we can’t rescue everyone, and for most people, evangelism is a turn-off.
Change is difficult. Change to a lifetime’s habits and way of living is particularly difficult because it rarely affects just the one person. Making a lifetime change to a way of eating affects the whole family – whether that’s because their lifestyle will also change by default, or because the person changing will change within the family dynamic as they are eating and living differently to the others. Clearly, those consequences have the potential to derail the best of intentions unless the person changing has the clear answer to the “why should I?” question –
and believes it.