'A second chance at life'

One Iowan's 'self-destruction path' leads her to stomach-reduction surgery - and better health

By JENNIFER DUKES LEE
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
March 6, 2005

Kingsley, Ia. - The third-grader smiled broadly for her 1963 school picture, her horn-rimmed glasses resting on chubby cheeks.

Her name was Carolyn, but her Kingsley classmates had other names for her:
North Carolina.
South Carolina.
Fatty-fatty two-by-four.

On the back of her third-grade picture, young Carolyn Davis wrote in cursive: "To my dearest friend nobody."

She wrote those words, she says, because no one wanted to be friends with the fat girl.

In the years ahead, the smile and innocence of the schoolgirl disappeared, replaced by bitterness, shame and depression. The pounds multiplied, reaching 395 by the time she was a freshman in high school.

She looked in the mirror and saw a loser staring back.

Millions of Americans know what she feels like.

This year, thousands of them will try desperately - yet again - to lose weight.

And according to statistics, most of them will fail. Many will get fatter.

Some will die.

It's an epidemic that's been neglected

Nearly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese - statistics that the nation's health leaders say are alarmingly deadly and excruciatingly difficult to reverse.

It's even worse in Iowa, which ranks as the 15th-most obese state in the nation, among the nation's fatter states.

The epidemic, which has worsened rapidly in the past two decades, has spawned thousands of diets, self-help books and pills. But for millions, nothing short of surgery seems to work - and even that approach has dangerous pitfalls.

Experts call obesity a neglected epidemic that has left virtually no demographic group untouched.

Even women wearing size-6 jeans pay the price. Here's why: The health-care costs of obese American adults amount to an estimated $90 billion annually, driving up expenses for anyone with a health-insurance policy - or for anyone who pays taxes.

"It's like secondhand smoking," said Morgan Downey, executive director of the American Obesity Association. "You don't have to be obese to be affected."

For the 127 million Americans who are overweight or obese, the problem is more than cosmetic.

The afflicted suffer from pain because of the stress of their weight on their joints. They live with the fear of heart attacks, strokes and a higher risk of cancer. Their weight problems are driving a rapid increase in diet-related diabetes cases nationwide, especially among children.

Some obese people must be connected to oxygen machines at night in order to sleep. They suffer from sleep apnea, a condition in which people lose the ability to breathe, waking themselves up hundreds of times a night in order to start breathing again.

Many take insulin, blood-pressure medication and cholesterol-fighting pills, which treat the related disorders but not the underlying problem. That's because unlike many diseases, medical science has yet to find a cure for obesity, which is expected to contribute to as many as 300,000 deaths in the United States this year, according to government officials.

Downey calls obesity "this country's greatest neglected public-health crisis." Yet, the amount spent on research into the problem is appallingly low, he said, partly because of public perceptions.

Being overweight has long been considered the result of gluttony and a lack of willpower. Who wants to his spend tax money to solve what is commonly viewed as someone else's personal failure?

A cycle of losing, gaining, crying

Carolyn Davis, the Kingsley schoolgirl who grew up to become Carolyn Clark, knows about blame.

As a teenager, she got a note in her mailbox with words pieced together from letters cut out of magazines:

"Why are you so fat? Do something about it!"

As a teenager, she tried. She gathered up money from baby-sitting to secretly go to the doctor for advice on losing weight.

As an adult, Clark tried again.

She experimented with herbal remedies. She tried Slim-Fast, diet pills and the Knox gelatin diet.

She'd lose 20 pounds, and gain 30. She'd lose 30 pounds, and gain 40 - an agonizing cycle that defines the struggle of many overweight Americans.

She'd draw the blinds in her mobile home and spend days in isolation.

"I'd sit in a corner and cry - just like at recess," said Clark, now 50.

She would rather die than live like this any longer. By the time she was 24 years old, she was already on her way.

Eating for comfort becomes routine

As a young mother of twin boys, Clark turned to food as a comfort. She would eat potato chips and chocolate marshmallow ice cream to ease the pain of a failing marriage.

Clark is on her third marriage and has three children: adult twin sons and a 12-year-old daughter.

Even during her happiest times, Clark admits, she ate more than she should.

"It was just habit," she said.

"I'd sit here and stuff my face, and while I was doing it, I'd think, 'Why are you doing this? Leave it alone! You know better,' " Clark said. "But you get an I-don't-care attitude. Nobody cares if something happens to me."

After hitting an all-time high of 395, she dropped 130 pounds over the years, but was still obese and had a litany of health problems. She took 16 different medications to help with her high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart problems, diabetes and depression.

She was not just obese; she was morbidly obese, a term used to define people who are at least 100 pounds overweight. Statistically, she was headed for a life that would end 20 years too early.

There is much of her life, though, that can't be measured statistically.

How do you measure misery?

How do you measure the embarrassment of being told that your marching band uniform will have to be "pieced together" because they don't have your size? How do you measure the shame of being unable to fit into a carnival ride at age 14?

"There were days I would tell myself, 'To hell with it, I'm done.' "

Her story is America's story

Clark's own story personifies what has unfolded nationally in the last two decades as obesity has reached epidemic levels.

• The nation's workplaces are filled with employees monitoring machines and computer screens, instead of performing physical tasks. Before leaving work on disability benefits in 1997, Clark had a desk job at MCI in Sergeant Bluff.

• Grocery stores now stock their shelves and coolers with easy-to-prepare, processed foods. Clark ate Cheez Whiz and bologna sandwiches.

• Entrepreneurs came up with the concept of food delivered to the door, and portion sizes ballooned. In Kingsley, Clark would polish off a large Pizza Hut pizza, while her daughter ate one of her own.

• Self-help gurus made a fortune promoting new diets. Clark tried them all.

• Nationwide, obesity has left a trail of health bills to treat symptoms such as diet-related diabetes. For her part, Clark's prescriptions totaled $1,029 per month, paid for by the government insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid.

• Medical professionals increasingly have defined obesity as a disease and have identified genetic links, especially among the morbidly obese. Clark's grandmothers were overweight, and now her own daughter, Katie, battles obesity. The seventh-grader weighs about 250 pounds.

• Insurers have tightened rules on who qualifies for coverage of stomach-reduction surgeries as the $30,000 operations have soared in popularity in the past few years.

Clark battled Medicaid for months before finally getting approval in late 2003 for the surgery.

She weighed 265 pounds, far less than she had weighed previously, but enough to qualify for surgery.

With approval in hand, she was thrilled, but scared.

"You're laying your life on the line with surgery," Clark said. "But to me, it was a Catch-22. I could die in surgery, but I was already dying without it."

For Clark, the clock was ticking. Three days after Christmas 2003, she had a mild heart attack.

"She's so much happier now"

The heart attack would delay surgery. But four months later, in a Cherokee operating room, Dr. Roger Shinnerl would staple Clark's stomach into the size of a golf ball.

"This was my last resort," Clark said. "I was on a self-destruction path."

Before surgery, she hung a yellow-and-white outfit at the front her closet. She hadn't been able to wear the outfit in 12 years, and it would become her motivation.

Two months later - and 34 pounds lighter - Clark wore the outfit to a family reunion.

She now weighs 180 pounds, eats off a saucer and hasn't had potato chips since before surgery. Chocolate marshmallow ice cream isn't allowed in the house.

By July, she hopes to weigh 150.

Clark no longer takes medication for high blood pressure or diabetes. She's off anti-depressants.

Her daughter notices the changes. Before surgery, Katie said, her mother's lack of self-esteem had turned her into a mean, cold person.

"She's so much happier now," Katie said.

The changes in her mother's diet have been good for Katie, too. Katie has slowly lost weight, dropping two sizes since her mother's surgery.

Katie said she's happy with her appearance, but she knows she needs to lose more weight. Her doctor said she's at risk of getting diabetes.

Katie talks tough - "If they don't like me for who I am, they can just shove it" - but on the inside, she sometimes hurts.

In her notebook of poems, she described her thoughts of suicide in the fifth grade.

"I look at Katie, and I see myself at that age," the mother said.

Like her mother, the daughter has tried diets and exercise, with limited success.

Katie has already told her mother she would like the surgery.

Someday, Clark tells her.

"It has given me a second chance at life," she said.

As a result, Clark is like an evangelist, handing out her doctor's business cards to strangers.

She threw away her size 4X sweat pants. She bought a bicycle at Kmart.

"I feel like a kid again," she said, but not like the child in the third-grade picture.

Because this time, she said, the smile is for real.

Even now, losing weight isn't easy. It has required drastic changes in her diet, and there are times when she hits plateaus.

She knows some people consider surgery a cop-out. She considers it her lifeline.

Never before has Clark gained so much by losing so much. She's lost weight and gained confidence; she's lost inches and gained happiness and health.

She looks in the mirror and sees a loser staring back.

A loser, but not a failure.

And when you listen to her story, you know what she means.
http://desmoinesregister.com

Your eating causes others to become obese. 
Do YOU cause secondhand obesity?

March 12, 2005

Sutton WV - First the study that found eating a burger near someone will influence them to eat too.  Now the cost of the obese is not firsthand but referred to as "secondhand."    Obesity is one of the new "cash cows" of the nanny/nazi industry.  (Depends on your point of view of the situation.)  While the nannies are telling us where we can smoke, drink, and soon where and possibly what we can eat - and those are the three main facets of how our society socializes in general, our local, state and national economies are going to hell in a hand bag.

And the tax man is having a hay-day taxing us to the hilt for our personal sins, sins which are defined by public policy, public policy which is now defined by paid advertisements from special interest groups, special interest groups who are funded by our tax dollars.

When will we stop allowing our government to fund special interest groups to micro manage our behavior and how we choose to socialize in our society with devastating effects to our economy?

"The health care costs of obese American adults amount to an estimated $90 billion annually, driving up expenses for anyone with a health insurance policy - or for anyone who pays taxes."It's like secondhand smoking," said Morgan Downey, executive director of the American Obesity Association. "You don't have to be obese to be affected.""

While this story, and a heart gripping one it is, is referring to someone who is hundreds of pounds overweight.  The trouble is that it implies that someone who is only slightly overweight is a great burden on society and costs all taxpayers excessive money, and surely will die a premature death.

Remember, until recently when the US Government changed the definition of obese, we were not an obese nation.

We became an obese nation with the stroke of a pen, which opened the flood gates to the untapped grant dollars available for the latest social behavior control program.

Maryetta Ables
PO Box 54
Sutton, WV  26601
304-765-5394
forceswv@verizon.net