Bean. Doctor Bean.
In the thread a couple down, I spoke of my annoyance with doctors, and got a comment from the good Dr Bean (Not his real name,I don’t suspect, and I don’t even know if he’s a doctor). Anyway, begging his pardon, here’s what I hope will be taken as a good natured fisking of his comment:
Doctors don’t know much about the specifics of dieting, so don’t go to them for that.
I don’t. I have asked doctors to reccomend dieticians, and I’ve gotten three:
1: Hindu woman with a 19″ waist, who told me I should stop eating everything but rice and vegetables. Yeah, right. I could see through her. No, not through her evil plan, through her body-she made a supermodel look like Rosie O’Donnell.
2: 330 lb dominatrix, who said I was eating the proper food already, I needed to alter the way I ate it, and the quantities. She sugested I eat ten meals a day, anything I want, as long as each meal be less than 1 cup, and I blend it before I ate it. Huh?
3: This one had the most promise, but she wouldn’t work with me, she just said ‘follow the South Beach diet, you’ll be fine”.
So, yes, I don’t expect a doctor to solve my problems, but a little help here and there in the way of useful support might be nice.
If you need help figuring out what to eat (most people can’t diet on their own) consider Weight Watchers. It’s sensible and it works. A lot of my patients are on it. (I have no financial relationship with them.)
If you read the post, I specifically say “i have tried everything but heroin addiction and surgery” I was not kidding. Including weight watchers. Hypnosis. Hot stone massage therapy. Acupuncture. the ____ diet (fill in the blank with anything). Several types of weight reduction drugs. Seattle sutton. Shall I go on? No, I shant. I have tried ev-ry-thing. This is another beef I have with most doctors, you tell them something in very clear terms, and they don’t listen.
If you need help committing to a cardiovascular exercise program to get you burning more calories than you eat (most people can’t exercise on their own) consider getting a personal trainer. It will make you accountable to someone to live up to your goals.
Thanks. I have a personal trainer. Exercise gives me a huge appetite. I try hard not to overdo either.
(I’m assuming one of these doctors checked your thyroid with a blood test called TSH. If not, ask your doctor to do that.)
Actually, I have had that test, but only because I suggested it to the doctor. He never looked at the results, but put me on thyroid medication anyway. This doctor was bigger than me, and is the one who told me ‘eat less, exercise more”. Sure. tell me how that’s working out for you, huh?.
Ultimately it’s about commitment and a decision that your current weight is unacceptable to you. And finding a doctor you like is ultimately about a good personality match and realistic expectations for each of you.
As for my weight being unacceptable, that’s the only thing all the doctors have agreed on: I’m too fat. As for finding a good fit,Yeah, this is true, but finding that doctor is a major pain in the ass. I have an optometrist I love, and he was the second optometrist I ever went to. I’ve been to five GP’s, (actually, an osteopath, an internist, another osteopath, a GP, and another internist) how many more should I try?
I hope that helps. Please hold your insurance card and a major credit card against your monitor for 5 seconds.
Thanks. NEXT! While I know this is intended as humor, I have to say that it is indicative of the profession as a whole. Dr Molenaar has NEVER asked me to pay his bill. I have had to call and beg him to send me a bill. He accepts NO isurance, and I often spend $600 a year there, and his business thrives. Give me a GP like that, and I’ll fight to keep him. I just can’t find one for love or money.
The final bitch I have, and I’ll shut up (no, not really) is that in medicine, there seems to be almost NO accountability. Doctors seem to be able to fuckup at will (up to a certain level) and the other people in the profession will stick by them. A doctor has to fuck up a GREAT deal, to the extent that he ends up in malpractice court, and even then he has this huge white wall of co-conspirators. So, if you go to a doctor and he doesn’t take good care of you, you have two choices: take whatever abuse or ill treatment you get, or hope he fucks up bad enugh to sue him. Neither seems like a good deal to me. If I did my job like that, I’d been fired long ago.
Enough for now. More bitching later (yeah, I changed my mind)
10 comments Og | Uncategorized
1. I completely accept my fisking in the spirit in which it was intended.
2. I agree that it’s way too hard for a physician to be disciplined for malpractice.
3. I was listening to you. I just didn’t believe you.
4. Does this mean that you’re not referring your wife and all your friends to me?
Don’t sweat it Og. You could give up real food and start eating tofu dinosauers instead, and still get stomped to death by a wooly mammoth tomorrow.
One of my childhood hunting buddies just passed away. He was 44. He was a big fella like you and sudden death in all directions with a duck gun or a fishing rod. He had The Big One on the pier at the lake up in the Northwest Territories as he lugged a 20 hp outboard motor down to the boat.
Everyone is weeping about the unfairness of dying like that at that age under those circumstances and I think they are nuts. He died doing what he loved, he didn’t linger, he ate what he wanted to and lived a full and happy life. There are guys twice his age that cannot say that.
In any event, if you want to lose weight, it can be done. Hire a British cook! A few months of boiled cabbage, hogs feet, faggots n’ peas, and haggis would leave Fat Albert slim and trim.
Probably wouldn’t do much for his outlook on life though.
Cheers, all!
Jim
My god, Jim, you’re absolutely correct. I need to go to the UK. That diet would surely give me the waif look. Of course, I’d need to tie a rock to my feet to keep from being blown away while shooting my 45’s.
Dr bean, my wife has a doctor she likes. Not covered by our insurance. And we’ll keep him, thankyouverymuch. Insurance or no. Don’t get me started on insurance.
On the other hand, Dr Bean, thanks for being a good sport. Even if you only play a doctor on TV.
I can’t speak for Doctor Bean’s ability as a physician, but he does a hell of a job around a campfire.
Og;
You have my deepest sympathy. I fear that the reason doctors and dieticians won’t tell you what you need to hear is that they are 1) afraid of sounding “judgemental” and 2) too lazy to do the work. It takes a great deal of research and experimentation to arrive at a sensible diet for you.
All of this is personal and subjective, of course — and I suspect you’ve come to some of these conclusions yourself.
1) OBesity is nowhere near the problem that the nannies make it out to be.
2) That said, overweight can’t help but put undue strain on your heart, muscles, bones, joints, etc.
3) Calories intaken versus calories burned is a hard equation. It doesn’t have much slack at all in it. Like the scifi story “The Cold Equation,” there is a lot of unpleasant truth in it. But once you get outside of it and appropriate it, you can come to peace with the process and your place in it — whether you choose to drive yourself crazy with it, or just say “fuggit” and go your merry way.
You cannot lose weight without you move your body. Your body becomes accustomed to certain treatment, and it is difficult to overcome that inertia. So initial efforts may seem to have counter-intuitive results. But even if you *don’t* lose weight behind it, exercise has its own rewards — endorphins, to say the least. ::grin:: It can also make extraordinary appetite less dangerous.
Alcohol lowers your blood glucose level. Taken in moderation, it can help. (OTOH, if you drink heavily, it can make you eat like a pothead, so a little self-discipline is in order.)
4) Serving size matters. But you can’t know it or benefit from it if you don’t keep track. Learning the caloric content of the foods you eat can seem overwhelming and incredibly wonky, but — like anything else — once you get it down, it can become second nature. Like times tables. Learning that 15×15 is 225 (it is, isn’t it?) drove you nuts, but now, it’s great being able to just rattle that off. If you keep track of what you eat (and I’m not saying you don’t — if you do already, consider this reinforcement of that behavior), you may find yourself appalled at how much you eat. (I know I have been on occasion.) And it can stiffen your resolve to cut back to at least reasonable levels.
I should stop now. I can go on about this forever. The diabetes thing, you know.
Don’t give up just because the “pros” seem to be a bunch of idiots on the subject.
M
One day I looked at a picture of me taken when I wasn’t ready and said “Who’s the fat guy?” Then “OH SHIT I’M FAT!” A year later after mucho mucho excercise and I’m not thin but not fat. Look pretty damn good, actually. Stopped drinking cold turkey for 5 months. Worked for me — no way was I going to cheat on a chillicheesedog if I had already given up something (beer) I really loved.
For you, if I was your personal trainer, I’d say find a way to mix exercise with shooting, like a woodland pars course with targets every 220 yards or so.
Pedro, you are a man after my own heart.
If it’s shooting and exercise you crave, why not take up the biathalon?
Or there’s always heroin (I listened – you said you hadn’t tried it).
LOL! hell, the amunition alone is expensive enough, I can’t imagine adding heroin on top of that.