I am at the intersection of several articles and comments, and they are setting my brain achurn. Over at the Nashville Scene, Betsy Phillips is talking about her most recent thoughts on the Obesity Frightfest. Over at Tiny Cat Pants, Aunt B. is talking about how scary the world can be for a fat person, especially when we see people hiding behind anonymity to tell us that all fat people are loathsome beasts who lack self-control and self-discipline.
Elsewhere people are talking about how if you are obese you will live to 95, but you’ll spend many of those years ::shock:: disabled. Then the comments veer into disgust at all the fat people one sees in wheelchairs and on scooters who are obviously too lazy to walk and too monstrous to eat like a “normal” person.
Two of my cousins–both of them young men, both of them “normal” weight–have been diagnosed with autoimmune disease in the last six months. As much as I hate it for them, there is a part of me who is relieved to no longer be alone on the island of misfit toys. I’m also very relieved to have other genetic links to the autoimmune chain. My mom put out some feelers to other parts of the family and now we’re digging up multiple relatives who have Crohn’s, Ankylosing Spondylitis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus, Hashimodo’s, Chronic Fatigue, and the dread catch-all Fibromyalgia. It seems that many people in my gene pool have been stricken. Our only fault is to have been born.
It’s not what we eat–some of us are fat, some not fat. It’s not our education level–we all have some degree of college, some of us have graduate degrees. It’s not ignorance–with the exception of me, all the stricken are either children of doctors or nurses or are nurses or doctors themselves. It’s not lack of exercise–before I was sick I danced and ran and weight-trained. My cousins played golf relentlessly, obsessively. It’s not what we eat–Some of us are vegetarians. Some of us eat red meat every day. It’s not where we live–we are scattered all over the world, from Michigan to Africa.
It’s just how the genetic throw of the dice landed for us. The same genes that gave us all happy homes with hardworking, intelligent parents who believed in sacrificing for their children’s education had to come up snake eyes at some point. And this is that point.
I know we Americans like to believe that our choices can control every outcome. We also have this eerie pastime of looking at others’ outcomes and attempting to divine their negative choices of the past. (“That wouldn’t happen if you didn’t have a baby at 14.” “That’s what happens when you eat too much.”) This culture needs to get over that festering self-determinism, because that is just not how the world works.
Bad things happen to good people because bad things happen to everyone. And they HAPPEN. Sure some things you can bring on yourself. Drive drunk and you just may kill yourself or someone else. Stab yourself and you’ll bleed. But you know what? Sometimes you are struck with depression or disability or disease because that’s just how life happens. The sooner you realise that, the sooner you stop trying to place blame and start trying to learn how to drive around the curves in the course the better off you’ll be.
And the sooner everyone stops trying to dig through the dank middens of other peoples’ pasts to blame them for things the better off we’ll all be.
As with most parts of life, there are some aspects we can control, and some we can’t. I can’t control my genetics or the fact that I was born prematurely, which set me up for a lifetime of health struggles. I can’t control a lot of things, but I do my best to make good health decisions. I’m feeling kind of low and tired right now, so I concur with this post. I’m always surprised at how other people claim one health discovery has changed their lives. Good for them. That hasn’t been my experience. For example, all my children are gluten-intolerant (that’s actually kind of a misnomer, but it’s a convenient term), so am I and, as my husband discovered after we stopped consuming it, so is he. But it hasn’t been this wonderful reversal to good health as others have had, and that’s disappointing. And it’s also just life.
Nancy Appleton has some interesting things to say about homeostasis. It’s something “regular” doctors don’t seem to understand, and I also think it’s why they are pretty useless when it comes to treating chronic conditions, such as autoimmune disorders.
I had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and autoimmune disorders run in my family, so I’ve taken a special interest in it. A conventional doctor who has been trained under Darwinism is more likely to view the body as something that is intrinsically flawed…they see no intelligence to the design…our bodies are just an accident.
People like Appleton and naturopathic doctors see the body as an innate healing machine…the body is intelligently designed and is always striving for health. They don’t view the immune system as the enemy that is “attacking” the body. In the case of autoimmune, they view it as an unbalanced body (for whatever reason) desperately trying to heal itself; therefore the focus is more on figuring it out what is throwing the body out of homeostasis and then allowing the body to heal itself. (Of course, to much of the church (little “c”) this is all New Age hoo hoo.)
One thing I’ve learned the hard way, as a consequence of peeling away at my own addictive behaviors, is that Jill is right, there is no magic bullet. If the body is off balance, you may take out gluten, but the body will still be off balance, so there will be health consequences. Also, as we well know, we live in a fallen world, where “perfection” is impossible and death is inevitable despite all our best efforts. It took me a while to get past that…i.e. why am I working so hard on my diet when I could get cancer anyway…but finally decided…at least I won’t feel as miserable on my way to developing cancer. (Cause cancer runs in my family too.)
Anyways, sorry to go on and on. Main point is, you might find Nancy Appleton’s books interesting.
Okay, I’m shutting up!