Roxane Gay is an American professor, editor, and social commentator and best seller writer. She is well-known for writing about her experience with obesity.
In her book, “Hunger, a memoir,” she takes the reader through her early adulthood emotional experiences and how they contributed to her eating habits. In one section she writes, “I often heard that stomach surgery is the only effective treatment for obesity, I believed my doctor was supposed to know what is best for me, and a psychiatrist talked to me about how to prepare for the surgery.”
“How do I deal with food once my stomach becomes the size of a thumb? And how to accept that “normal people may try to sabotage your weight loss because they were invested in the ideas of us as fat people?
We learnt how our bodies would be nutrient deprived for the rest of their lives. How we would never be able to eat or drink within half-an-hour of doing one or the other, our hair will fall or thin out, our body being prone to dumping syndrome.”
Obesity is a worldwide problem that challenges scientists, health care providers and people suffering from it.
A recent study proved what we know many years ago that what you eat is the main determining factor to whether you are slim or obese.
Other factors such as metabolic rate and exercise do play apart but food is the main culprit.
If you have been exploring the idea of weight loss you would have come across different diet regimes, some more famous than others. In the nineties, the Atkin diet was famous in the US and Europe as it was adopted by several movie stars and celebrities, there was the weight watcher enterprise in the UK which combined pre-prepared healthy meals with support group sessions.
Here in Oman and other Gulf countries diet selling clinics are flourishing as modern lifestyle which combined more options of tasty and not so healthy food with less movement lead to people eating more than what their bodies can process which leads to obesity and other health complications related to it such as heart disease, increased blood sugar and even strokes.
As many visitors of weight loss clinics feel frustrated with the lack of progress, new methods are used to draw people in and keep them more optimist about shedding more kilograms of their bodies.
Unfortunately, most people trying to lose weight do not address the emotional part of eating and how food is used to handle unpleasant feelings such as anger, frustration and low self-esteem.
This is why some people regain their original weight even after having stomach surgery.
The link between food and mental health is too important to be ignored and works both ways, your mood determines how much and what you eat and weight gain can impact your mental wellbeing and self-esteem. Only when we address both aspects can a successful diet programme can be adopted.
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