Dr. J on Medical Research on Obesity From Comedy Central

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) Douglas Pimentel/Flickr

My department was teaching a continuing education course and I had been told that my lecture was scheduled in room C-205 of the Communicore lecture building. As it turned out, the correct room number was C-207. C-205 was a men’s restroom! Arriving at the podium, I apologized to the group for being a little late, telling them about how I went to the men’s restroom first by mistake. I finished the story with, “…but I gave my lecture anyway, because it was the first time I had a standing-room-only audience!” They seemed to appreciate that introduction.

At least that audience was awake. I once had a group of medical students that I was lecturing to at 7 a.m. Half of them were asleep, and I hadn’t even started yet! As I once was a medical student, I knew what they went through and didn’t have the heart to wake them up. I figured if they ever went into my specialty area, they would learn the material eventually.

I used to think I might have potential as a medical comedian working the many large medical society meetings that occur almost weekly across the globe, with sort of “A funny thing happened to me on the way to the operating room” approach.

Lately, however, I’m finding my humor in another area: medical research and, to be specific, obesity research.

It’s well known that as society is getting heavier, people’s perception of what constitutes a normal weight is also increasing. Those who are normal think they are thin, those who are heavy think they are normal and so forth. Now a study comes out that says people who think they are fat get fatter! If this wasn’t our reality, it would make excellent material for Comedy Central.

It seems that almost everything leads to getting fat. As a society, we are all in step and heading in the fat direction! From what I read in the study above, most of us are going to get fat no matter how we feel; that said, if we don’t think we are fat, we won’t get as fat, but we still will be fat. If measured by the BMI, the results are bad; if measured by waist circumference, the results are worse! In addition, since exercise would seem like the obvious way of avoiding this, sorry, you can fuhgeddaboutit, because the research shows it doesn’t help. At best, you are going to be a fat exerciser.

The reasons given for these results included the following: psychosocial stress can lead to abdominal obesity, changing eating habits (such as skipping meals and especially skipping breakfast), the effects of constant dieting on metabolism and set-point theory. The last reason of set-point I can’t understand: if their bodies were trying to return to the former perceived-as-fat-yet-not-fat weight, how did their bodies end up as being fat?

At this point, I and all the other people that I am familiar with who do not seem fat must either be in denial of how fat we really are, or are about to get fat just like that when we have therapy for our, possibly contagious, global body dimorphic disorder.

If we add this comedic reasoning to the information in Bob Wieder’s book, “115 Reasons Why It’s Not Your Fault If You’re Fat,” it becomes even more apparent that we are all definitely fat.

I don’t know about you, but I intend on continuing to be delusional and pretend that I am not fat as I eat a healthy, portion-controlled diet and remain as active as I can. Maybe I’ll be fat tomorrow, but for today, I’ll be a trim doctor on the comedy circuit.

In the interest of knowledge and clarity, I asked a research scientist, “How many research scientists does it take to change a light bulb?”

His answer: “Why bother, we already know that a light bulb is not capable of changing!”

I guess that’s why I’ve always been more interested in understanding than doing medical research.

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Dr. J on Medical Research on Obesity From Comedy Central is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/08/13/dr-j-on-medical-research-on-obesity-from-comedy-central/

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