Harold

Graves

10/29/07

In its’ own way, society is weeding out the most obese, the largest and closest to unhealthy and pressing them to become a different size, demanding weight loss and productivity. With this unbridled attack on the obese, more and more pressure builds and the obese respond.

Thomas, age 43, died on April 14th of 2005, his skin turning to a pallid color of grey and white, his body starting to show stark veins and the skin that had so naturally hung to him now falling away, like dead skin from a shedding snake. He weighed 210 lbs and is a victim of gastric bypass surgery.

Two years prior to his death, Chad at 360 lbs decided he’d get the surgery that could save his career and his marriage, having surrendered his life to work on a prison campus and constant exercise; he couldn’t seem to keep the weight he lost off. He and his wife agreed to go up to Cleveland, a three-hour drive from their home of Chillicothe Ohio. The Corrections Officer then spent a week in the hospital after a few basic tests, surgery began. With the surgery complete, the overweight and skeptical Corrections Officer waited and recovered for a week.

Later, Chad’s’ weight was down to a ‘good’ and healthy size, where he could move about the house freely and could play with his two children, the adopted Tyler and his daughter Alexis. Wendy, his wife, said that they were both better for Chad having lost the weight, and Chad could spend his time with those he loved the most, with friend and coworker Tom, running down a local bike path, where he’d lose all of the one-hundred-fifty pounds he’d lose before his death.

In the autopsy only a few days after his final run, the Corrections Officers’ stomach displays a ring of mottled black and purple bruise, where the band on that’d been surgically implanted on his body had squeezed too tight and started to bruise the muscle and tissues. The Coroners report reads that the cause of death is not ‘malpractice’ or ‘misconduct’, but the report says simply ‘Malnourishment’.

Chad was three-hundred and sixty pounds, whereas most people his height are around two hundred forty, or a little more. Not the ‘healthy’ standard of people projected by strange and unforgiving charts, like the Body Mass Index. Pointedly, people ‘healthy’ and obese alike pressure those we deem overweight

The Body Mass Index is not a chart people should be made to live by. The chart itself is distorted easily by the differing levels of fitness, age, muscle mass, bone structure, bone mass, gender and ethnicity. The chart basically has no bearing and there is no adjusted scale for each of these factors which can adjust the ideal weight for different people with different genes. The scales even doctors use, left taped to a wall next to a scale is made defunct and inoperable by all the factors not taken into account by the simple idea most people know. Despite this, the people who do have an ideal BMI, are at a greater risk than people who are overweight than cardiovascular disease. People are different, and each one is different.

With all the pressure of life, society and other things, obese people are trying all over the place to lose weight and make it to the BMI golden goal, so they can attain that perfect weight with different pills, exercise routines, and all the surgery now covered by medical insurance, rather than just being pleased with themselves. So with all the pressure, what are people doing?

With all the pressure pressing them into this direction, those they claim are the most unhealthy, with the god of BMI on the side of health, more and more of the overweight, the worst of these will be weeded out and we’ll have cleared the topmost part of a pyramid of unhealthy people, maybe the most stubborn, but the smallest group of the obese, or unhealthy. What happens next? With the heaviest people gone, we only create another group, the heaviest (II) whom are weeded out by ‘support’ groups and different people replace those people, every one of those in a certain height ranges will start to be the same weight, with only a little difference between them. Surely, with all the different people who have different weights at the same height, each will have the changes mentioned before, like race, gender, muscle and body mass, fitness etc. BMI does not forgive, for BMI is a part of science, and in the stead of reason, the weak minded and weary will turn to anything whereupon the badge named ‘science’ is stapled.

With more and more of the most obese people eliminated from society in one way or another, rising craze for the underweight will spill forth and pressure will be taken off the overweight, if only for a moment. The underweight will probably be attacked, at the very closest to low BMI and then the attention will shift back to the highest for one or two rounds of this perpetual peer pressure. Slowly the spiral will run, turning itself into a sort of whirlpool until the average weight of the community is only different by a couple points on the BMI scale. Then what would come? If all are the same proportions, just different heights and sizes, the vox populi may turn toward different heights, the tall and short will be targeted. Whittling down those who are tall and small all will slowly become the same height.

For a time humanity may be able to avoid the trappings in dealing with one race or another, but slowly, eyes will turn to the different genes and single one group out as having the weakest or the strongest genes for being ‘ small’ or ‘ tall’ maybe one race will be ‘found’ to have a ‘fat gene’. When the eye of the people turn, so too will the fingers they point and pressure will be put on those people and in one way or another they might disappear, as did those who were not average size or shape.

A rational thinker might say that a problem wouldn’t get this far, or that someone, something would have stood up for these people, the ones who are abused and downtrodden now. Some of these now labeled freaks would be pushed under, but others would protest. The simple fact is that much like in the past, where there was no ‘witch-topia’ no ‘heretic-topia’ and no ‘semite-topia’, neither will there be a refuge for the people deemed not fit to be as they are or live as they live. Slowly the people who stick out too much will become the next group, the pro-fat/tall/small/short politic who believes in ideals that are not like what one or more people have convinced the people in the name of science to believe. Our minds will be swayed just like the Europeans during the Crusades, the people of Salem during the Witch Trials, Germans during Hitler’s’ reign.

For such a ‘far-out’ theory on what might happen if the people of the world don’t learn to accept each other, it may be interesting to note another thing about something Adolf Hitler did. He wrote two books, and published one. Only in the year 1938, there were 250,500 copies sold in that one year of Mein Kampf, and still today it remains sold in thousands of stores in many different countries.

So maybe the world needs to just turn to another radical dictator to lead us from the fat people, who have caused cancer, global warming and were the ones who created anthrax. Maybe our new leader can be a seven-hundred-pound behemoth of a man who simply has a ‘daddy’ complex. We’ll call him just an artist who dabbled in politics or something. Since everyone seems worried about the wrong thing too often in too many circumstances, it’ll probably take another catastrophe for people to realize the lesson we learned in 1756, 1865, 1945 and conveniently forgot when someone needed another scapegoat to rise to power.

Short stature is related to high body fat composition despite body mass index in a Mexican population, Lopez-Alvarenga JC, Montesinos-Cabrera RA, Velazquez-Alva C, Gonzalez-Barranco J. , Arch Med Res. 2003 Mar-Apr;34(2):137-40

Association of bodyweight with total mortality and with cardiovascular events in coronary artery disease: a systematic review of cohort studies. . Lancet (2006-08-19;368(9536):666-78). Retrieved on 2007-07-08.

a b Hitler dodged taxes, expert finds BBC News