Monday, May 16, 2005
Health cult theory, further explained.
I don’t think I said it all that well down here, or maybe I just didn’t make clear what the point of all of that random philosophizing was, but the thing that’s got me ready to scream is the way that people think that it is 100% possible to ward off ill health through diet and exercise, and that therefore anyone who does suffer a malady of a certain sort is blame for it. The utter conviction that other people are sick because they’re bad people and since you’re obviously not a bad person no such harm can befall you seems to be behind a lot of the obesity hysteria. We’ve turned things upside down, drawn an inference there that is unwarranted. That it may be possible to reduce one’s risk for a disease does not translate into one is to blame for one’s disease. Nothing is 100% here in the real world, and you can’t live forever if you just eat enough tofu.
It occurred to me that this might be some sort of attempt to fill a spiritual void.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because it hits very close to home for me. I’ve been desperately trying to do something about the baby weight. My doctor is quite perturbed with me for not losing it already. Hell, after four months he told me that normally he tells a nursing mother to eat what she wants and enjoy herself, but...(yeah, I know I should fire him for that, but hang with me here). The thing is that I have high blood pressure, and the presumption is that if I lost the weight, we could cut back on or eliminate the medication I take.
So I was looking through my medical records from my time in the Navy because I ran across them and I’ve been curious about this for a while. And yes, my blood pressure problems were showing up even at the tender age of 25. The majority of the readings are higher than any reading my doctor has ever gotten, even way back before he put me on meds in the first place.
The problem with this is that those higher readings came when I was exercising a minimum of 2 hours a day, 6 days a week (under the expert supervision of the United States Marine Corps) and weighed a full fifty pounds less than I currently do.
So forgive me if I don’t think diet and exercise are going to miraculously solve my problem. In fact, forgive me if I decide to get general and think that maybe I’m not the only one that applies to. It’s fantastic if diet and exercise help you control your blood pressure. Hell, I hold out hope that maybe someday it’ll work for me. But I am so fucking tired of being treated like an idiot. I eat healthy. I’m in better shape now than I was at my last desk job.
I’m not doing anything wrong.
And yet I saw it suggested recently that it is immoral for people like me to take blood pressure pills. It is wrong, goes the argument, because fat people are obviously doing something wrong, and if they’d just eat right and exercise, then we wouldn’t have hypertension and we’d quit ruining the health care system for people who actually take care of themselves.
This wouldn’t bother me if it wasn’t such a common opinion. And this sort of thing is what I’m talking about when I call the health thing a fetish or a superstition. If I just do everything right, the thinking goes, the boogeyman can’t get me.
This has gotten so severe that when Cojo was on Oprah, she asked if he would share how high his blood pressure got that it alarmed his doctors and said it was ok if he didn’t want to, because it’s like weight, we’re ashamed of it (I’m paraphrasing, obviously, but that’s pretty close). And the man had Polycystic Kidney Disease, for crying out loud. How in the hell can you be ashamed of that?
In any case, this is why I worry about what they’re doing to the smokers, because what they’re doing to them today they do to us fat people tomorrow. As far as I can tell, there’s no fix for the thing, short of freeing the healthcare market, which isn’t going to happen. But that’s not going to stop me from screaming about it. After all, I am a blogger. That’s what I do.