the trade-off

There's this thing we do sometimes when we hear about long-term illnesses in the news or from friends: decide which disease we'd rather have, that or MCS.

Today's disease is obesity. This article has a quote from a woman who constantly wonders if she'll fit places, and the US Surgeon General said that if people keep getting heavier "the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9-11 or any other terrorist attempt."

I think people already know that obesity is bad; comparing it to a terrorist attack seems really over the top, but then again, it's the government, and they're always telling us things that maybe aren't all that, well, true.

So anyway, the treatment plan for my illness is chemical avoidance and detoxing, which for me boils down to diet, exercise, and staying away from stinky stuff like stores and offices. I hear I should be better in roughly a year and a half. The treatment for obesity, as far as I know, is just diet and exercise, and if I'd been 100 pounds overweight when I started getting better six months ago, I'd have all the extra weight off in the same time frame, assuming a pound a week loss rate. Now, I recognize that I have a huge extra incentive: I feel like crap if I don't follow my diet or exercise. I know that heavy people feel the difference after two months of exercise, just like I did, but the diet thing, I'm quite sure, feels a lot more like an article of faith, particularly if you put on some muscle mass that obscures your fat mass loss.

I think I'd still rather be fat than have MCS, although, if you do the math with me 100 pounds overweight, I'd have a BMI of 37.8, and obese starts at 30, and I'm imagining strapping 20 5-pound bags of flour to my body, and it's not entirely clear that I could move if I did that.