Four Weeks & A Rant
4 weeks back with WW—27 on program days out of 28—6.4 pounds down
And I'm okay with that. The scale is moving—O Happy
Day—it's even moving in a good direction. I wish it was moving faster, but I'll take what I can get.
Still, I live for the day that it goes back down under that
(If you name it, you know, it'll just hang around forever . . .)
Meanwhile, there's a red star marked on the 13th. Since I had my tubes tied years and years ago and I haven't taken birth control pills since then (that being the point and all), my periods pick their own schedule. Hence the dates that I mark on the calendar aren't really targets—they're more of a guideline.
According to my calendar I am approximately well into the Week Before. Until lunch yesterday I wasn't feeling particularly hormonal.
Even when we got to lunch I wasn't ravenously hungry. But my hormones made themselves felt in the other usual way. You know, RAGE?
I mean, there we were, the Lunch Three—me, Mikie, and our friend and coworker, Cee. Chatting away. Like we do. Unsurprisingly, a big topic for us these days is Mikie's upcoming surgery and the changes to come. Particularly the changes to come for lunch. In other words, enough about you, how will this affect ME? Anyway, we were chatting away when I was suddenly struck by how angry it actually made me, going to that lapband meeting.
I mean, after I got over how sad it was that I was sitting in a roomful of people who have decided that they're powerless over what they're putting in their mouths. After I got over that, it struck me just how expensive that particular roomful of people was. And I'm not even talking about how much the surgeries for those 40 people (and that's just one meeting night!) is going to cost.
Every one of those people in that room was experiencing weight-related complications and comorbidities. Many (like Mikie) could barely walk. Many were having trouble breathing—sitting down. I'm sure that many of them, maybe even most of them, were being treated (like me) for type 2 Diabetes, and/or hypertension, and/or high cholesterol. And that's just the big three on the list of comorbidities, right?
Think about it. If a corporation were responsible for destroying the health of all those people, they'd be up to their ears in litigation. If an individual were responsible for abusing all those people that way, they'd be labeled a criminal.
But no corporation was responsible, and the individuals responsible were all sitting there with us. Because they were us. US.
We did all of that to ourselves. We put ourselves in that room. Wrecked our hips, knees, ankles, feet. Wrecked our ability to regulate our blood sugar. Forced our blood pressure up. Filled our arteries with plaque. WE DID IT.
But we're making everybody else pay for it.
I don't care which way you turn it, that's just wrong.
Seriously. I'm not trying to tell anybody else what to eat or not to eat. But health insurance costs are rising faster than gas prices and with the morbid obesity rate observed in American there's no end in sight. You see lots of talk about that, but nothing about what all of that's going to COST.
I'm just wondering how long it will be before insurance companies start putting a cap on these things? Or company policies start refusing to insure you if you're over X BMI? Or maybe they'll continue to insure you but at a higher premium, the way that auto insurance rates are calculated according to risk category.
The thing is, our obesity—mine, yours, everybody's—isn't only impacting us. It isn't only impacting our friends and our families. It's impacting everybody on our insurance plan.
But it's not nice to talk about that, right?
It's perfectly okay to make everybody else pay for your medications and your doctor visits and your tests and your surgeries because you won't stop eating. But it's not nice to talk about it.
It's okay to say, well, you're a 16-year-old male, your chances of having a car accident are a gajillion times higher than a 47-year-old male, so you're going to have pay a higher premium.
But it's somehow not okay to say, well, you're a severely obese, 43 year-old woman. Your chances of contracting type II diabetes are a gajillion times higher than a nonobese 23-year-old woman, so you're going to have pay a higher premium.