Dad's eating himself into a grave

[cdn2wheeler]

Just came back from a short family gathering and wanted to share this with the group.

For many, many years my father has been obese. Not chunky, not kinda heavy, not just plain fat, but morbidly obese.

He says he's fat because he describes food as the only pleasure he has left. He hasn't been sexually active for well over a decade, he used to fly helicopters but lost his medical clearance and can't fly as pilot-in-command anymore, he can't travel anymore due to some health issues... and he and my mother haven't got along as a couple since, well, probably the first Clinton administration.

So he eats. And eats. And eats and eats and eats and eats. When he's not eating he's reading the newspaper or watching TV, and those diversions are just time-fillers between meals.

He's quite aware of the fact that he's morbidly obese, he's not in denial in the least. It's just that he simply doesn't care what anyone else thinks. He fully understands that one day he's probably going to have a massive stroke or heart attack and expire while sh!tting himself on the hall rug.

My mother won't do anything about it. She's almost as big as he is and is far too interested in "being her own person" and all that to countenance any suggestions that she may be overdoing it in the food department.

I'm frankly not sure what, if anything, I should do here. Any suggestions?

[dennis08]

Well there is only one solution to this and that is that he stop eating so much. There is nothing you can do if the man feels that you need to go ride a bike so he can eat in peace then theres not much here.

[kulai]

If you can use the pain and pleasure principle in NLP, losing weight can work. Tony Robbins talked a lot about this in his teachings, and in his book Awaken The Giant Within. If your parents are as obese as you said, then the solution goes beyond dieting. You might want to get a copy of the book or seek an expert on the matter for help.

Power-To-Live.com

[escapee]

If there is any interest on immediate nutritional intervention, get him/her started on EFAs & minerals supplementation immediately sold on the following site.

Your Essential Supplements Home

http://www.yes-supplements.com/efa-study10-05.pdf ( Independent Study done in Italy : Essential fatty acids Vs food craving )

Constant Food craving can only be halted or reduced when the underlying cause is addressed ( nutrient deficiency /borderline deficient ). Once the food craving subsides, try to 'push' to more healthy food choice such as organic whole food, non-frying grass fed animal food and etc. Best wishes.

Essential nutrient - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The above is just my personal opinion based on experience .




Note: i'm not affiliated with the site but a user on one of the products.

[lizthefair]

It seems unlikely to me that this is primarily a diet issue. If he's trying to kill himself with food, or finds no joy in any other aspect of life, that's the real problem.

If you can help him find joy, or find the help he needs to find joy that has to happen first.

Then, and only then will he be open to undoing the current damage.

[Rose of Cairo]

cdn2wheeler, I'm sorry to hear this about your dad. I guess that's not an easy situation for you. But if he's fully conscious and aware of his exact situation and freely decides to continue, then there's nothing you can do. It's his life, his decision. Trying to help him losing weight doesn't make any sense IMO. The only thing you could try to do is helping him to understand that eating is NOT the only pleasure he can have in life. Now the how is another question...

Have you tried to talk with him about this question? I mean, not about "it's unhealthy to be so fat, you'll die if you continue" but about finding other pleasures in life and giving him a bit more positive view of life?

I hope this doesn't drag you down. Lots of love

[escapee]

Most of the time, you are what you eat. Your brain is made of the food that you consume daily. SO to me it makes sense that diet plays a major role ( as well as environment, external stimulus and etc ) in a person behavior. Haven't you heard of a hungry man is an angry man ?


A WORKING BRAIN.; Can Be Made Successful on Right Food. - Article Preview - The New York Times

Magnesium Deficiency and Violent Crime

[Tasaio]

If your dad likes animals, or considered becoming vegetarian, why not wean him off meats?

People will tell you that lean meats are better than cheese pizzas, but it sounds like your dad is stuck on junk food.

If you transition him to vegetarian junk food, at least, then he'll be intaking less meats.

This will be healthier, and he'll feel a sense of accomplishment in being vegetarian.

This helped me in my situation immensely. In time, I was able to transition off the vegetarian junk food--because of my increase in confidence.

---

The other thing I suggest is that he confine his meals to 3 per day.

People will tell you it's healthier to have polyphasic meals, but in my experience, it just doesn't work. You never feel full! You're always hungry

But if your dad confines his meals--including much-needed treats--to 3 times a day--then it will establishment some sort of routine, some sort of control, over his endless eating.

[escapee]

If you transition him to vegetarian junk food, at least, then he'll be intaking less meats.

What's the issue with meats ? Because China study says so ? I cant accept that Vegetarian junk food is any healthier than meats (well nobody should ) .

[escapee]

I can tell you what's the issue with "modern meats" .

The issue with meats is not meats itself . It's the hormone, chemicals (processed meat),pesticides and most importantly, the toxic lipic that's generated as a result of using PURA(vegetable oil ) as a cooking oil. Think of french fries(vegetarian junk food ) soaking in unchanged deep fried hydrogenated oil .... EWWWWWWW ... ( TRANS FAT + LIPID HYDROPEROXIDES )

Yeah, China study does not tell you that.

Dietary lipid hydroperoxides induce expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in human colorectal tumor cells -- Jurek et al. 19 (1): 97 -- The FASEB Journal

Oxidants from endogenous sources are considered procarcinogenic agents. These include lipid peroxides formed from polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) during (chronic) inflammation. Similar oxidation products may be formed exogenously from PUFA in dietary fats and oils. Oxidation of dietary lipids is greatly enhanced at higher temperatures during cooking. Consequently, fatty acid hydroperoxides are normal contaminants of our diet. As much as 25% of oxidized polar compounds consisting of hydroperoxides and their split products have been found in oils repeatedly used for frying. Using lipid membranes and tissue culture models, we have shown that such hydroperoxides interact with the lipid bilayer of cell membranes. They induce the formation of lipid radicals that enter the cells and cause toxic damage and disturb regulatory networks.

Here we show that the model compound linoleic acid hydroperoxide (LOOH) stimulates expression of COX-2 and VEGF synthesis in LT97 adenoma and SW480 carcinoma cells from the human colon. The results suggest that dietary lipid hydroperoxides may induce blood vessel formation in colon polyps and thereby accelerate one of the rate-limiting steps in colorectal carcinogenesis.

In summary, our results indicate that LOOH, considerable quantities of which may occur in typical Western-style diet, can induce expression of both COX-2 and VEGF and may be an important exogenous risk factor of colorectal carcinogenesis. The effect of LOOH can be blocked by inhibitors of PG synthesis.

[hollowman]

about a year ago my father had his left kidney removed because of a tumor. he reli got the whole family worried. i am not a medical person but from some health reading i think that he cancer might be due to bad eating habit. He loves all the junk food, both the very sweet and the very salty. he also love all kind of fried and oily food.

so after the operation, we advised him to be more concerned of his diet. but he openly declared that 'i am not afraid of death' . We being persistent to coax him into watching his eating habit and his respond is 'is cant enjoy eating what i love to eat, i rather die!!!'

i dunno if we shoud feel frustrated or funny... and so we were helpless

but out of love we continue to persuade him, sometimes the soft way and sometimes some sarcasm... like 'there are four of us here (siblings), and if u destroy another kidney that u have left, fear not because we have 2 kidneys each to offer u for replacement'.

sometimes my sister was so with my dad's relentless eating attitude that she really cried when my father refused to listen and came up with all kind of excuses. so perhaps u should shed some tears....

well i must really say it's not easy to persuade our old folks at home...

just be persistent, do things out of love for our old man, and patience is absolutely necessary. if u r a guy of faith then prayer is vital too. Good luck and all the best

[robertanthony]

Hi Cdn

When reading your posting my first impression was that the food problem is a symptom of the unhappiness in the relationship. Food has become the substitute for the good feelings that are no longer there. Food has become a form of self-medication & comfort. When someone falls into this trap it's very hard to ask them to give up what makes them comfortable / sedated.

There's a therapy concept that therapists use. You find out what the 'pay off' is. What's the 'positive purpose' of eating so much. What's the food doing for you. The hit you get.

If you ask an obese person what's good about eating this food they are initially surprised that your not nagging them. If you ask them about what they feel when they eat this food they might list positive emotions - it's good to get all these positive emotions out - really let them tell you in as much detail as possible what they get out of eating.

If you get a list of these positive feelings in your mind - then ask your parents how they can get these feelings elsewhere in a way that doesn't hurt or harm them.

They might become aware that they are eating for emotional reasons.

Incresing awareness that there is a problem is the first step.

Some people hire a health coach with specialist knowledge in obesity/diabetes. However be careful about peoplle selling herbal products or charlatans who have no real experince in professional health fields.

[Angela]

This isn't dad's problem, this is cdn's problem. Dad sounds like he's making his own choices (harmful as they sound to us) and is contendedly eating himself to death. The big problem here (as I'm hearing it) is the pain that causes for his son.

cdn, I'm sorry about the pain this causes you. You can't change another person, and telling a person what he "needs" to do is not going to change his behavior one bit, as you've probably experienced. You can change who you who you are being, though, of course. Have you approached him from a point of view of total acceptance, accepting everything he is, everything he is not, and all his choices? You don't have to condone his choices in order to accept him and his choices 100%. Just surrender your fight against what is.

You've probably done this already, but have you let him know how much you love him and want him to stick around for a long, long time, for your sake? That it hurts you to see him hurting and uncomfortable? How his choices have influenced your own? These questions occur much differently when you are coming from a pov of 100% acceptance (as opposed to our normal, want-the-person-to-change pov).

Best wishes to you and your family, and wishing you all vitality and good health.

love,
angela

p.s. have you picked up The Astonishing Power of Emotions yet? It talks a lot about how to deal powerfully with the pain that we feel because of other people.

[Matthew Shea]

Cdn, if you want him to lose weight, you're going to need to give him a good reason to do so. Does he have any grandkids he might want to see grow up? Is there something, like the piloting, that might be a strong enough pull for him to overcome his eating? Without a compelling reason to stop killing himself with the food, nothing you do is going to change his behavior.

[Dan.Linehan]

I say every time he eats around you, smash his plates of food right into his face. That goes for your Mom too.

That way they'd have to chase you to get you back... and running is good exercise.

[Zukin]

The key is to get him to realize that he will get much more enjoyment out of life if he implements a healthy lifestyle. Lots of unhealthy people aren't afraid of death:
Change or Die

Then the knockout blow was delivered by Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University. He turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. The procedures temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives. Around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this so-called restenosis are complex. It's sometimes a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself. But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery -- not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them -- by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller said. "And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."
...
Look again at the case of heart patients. The best minds at Johns Hopkins and the Global Medical Forum might not know how to get them to change, but someone does: Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, in Sausalito, California. Ornish, like Kotter, realizes the importance of going beyond the facts. "Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored." Ornish published studies in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, showing that his holistic program, focused around a vegetarian diet with less than 10% of the calories from fat, can actually reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. Still, the medical establishment remained skeptical that people could sustain the lifestyle changes. In 1993, Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial. Researchers took 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. They helped them quit smoking and go on Ornish's diet. The patients attended twice-weekly group support sessions led by a psychologist and took instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. The program lasted for only a year. But after three years, the study found, 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes -- and safely avoided the bypass or angioplasty surgeries that they were eligible for under their insurance coverage. And Mutual of Omaha saved around $30,000 per patient.
...
Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed? For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways. The patients lived the way they did as a day-to-day strategy for coping with their emotional troubles. "Telling people who are lonely and depressed that they're going to live longer if they quit smoking or change their diet and lifestyle is not that motivating," Ornish says. "Who wants to live longer when you're in chronic emotional pain?" So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.

[Zukin]

Also, because I can anticipate what escapee is going to say in response to my last post, a low-fat vegetarian diet isn't the only thing that can make people feel better. It is possible to include healthy fats & meat and dramatically lose weight.

The key is getting the person to try to live a healthier lifestyle by focusing their mind on how good they can feel rather than trying to scare them. Even losing just a few pounds can reduce the risk of heart disease.

[Zukin]

This part of the article is also important:

Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.' "

While it's astonishing that most patients in Ornish's demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn't actually make them feel any better. It doesn't deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones.

[dennis08]

I still say he stop eating so much its the only way there are no gray areas.

[escapee]

The reason why Ornish low fat whole food vegetarian may work on the short term because it eliminates the intake of deadly trans fats and lipid hydroperoxides from the typical western diet. Staying long term on low fat diet will cause deficiency in Omega 6, omega 3 and other fat soluble vitamins, which is why i think we (vegetarian/non-vegetarian) all need to establish a balance relationship with the healthy natural fats in order to stay healthy.

BTW, Similar or better result can be reproduced by traditional omnivore diet used by some of the longest living cultures in the world (eg: Okinawan , dont tell me they are 'near vegan' ).

To me, low fat diet is completely unnecessary.

Anthony Colpo - Why the Low-Fat Diet is Stupid and Potentially Dangerous (remember to go through the references )

Is a Low-Fat Diet Risky? - TIME

say Dr. Edward Siguel and his colleague Dr. Robert Lerman, but diets deficient in "good" fats may actually be dangerous to human health. Backing up this startling assertion is a study Siguel and Lerman published in the journal Metabolism. In 47 patients with heart disease, they reported, blood levels of compounds known as essential fatty acids were strikingly lower than the levels found in healthy people.

Fatty acids, the building blocks for fat, are divided into three chemical classes according to their hydrogen content: saturated, mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated. Only the polyunsaturated ones are considered "essential," meaning they cannot be manufactured by the body. Like minerals and vitamins, they must be ingested as food. "If we don't eat enough," says Siguel, "then we won't have enough." And that would be unfortunate, for these compounds -- principally linoleic acid and linolenic acid -- are vital to the maintenance of cell membranes and to the manufacture of potent chemical messengers that regulate everything from blood pressure to the firing of nerves.

[rusty]

Hi cdn,
I know this must be real hard to watch someone you love destroy themselves. Can I ask you a question, who brings the groceries into the house? It really is not important that I know the answer to that question,but the point that I am trying to make is that someone is bringing the food into the house and by doing that it enables the person who is over eating to continue there habit.

I am not saying to starve your dad,but what I am saying is that someone should take control over the quantity of food that he eats,but of course seek medical help in the process so that it is done in a safe and healthy manner.

On the other hand he has to want to lose weight. He has to want this for himself and really mean it or it just will not work. It took a long time to get this way and it will take time to get rid of it,but it can be done.

Have you thought about maybe contacting Richard Simmons? He may be person who could give him the boost that he needs to turn things around.

I wish you a lot luck in your quest to help your dad.

[cdn2wheeler]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. All of them are appreciated.