Obesity can be beaten, like smoking
Mind matters
BY LAWSON WULSIN | ENQUIRER CONTRIBUTOR
Can you imagine someone losing 450 pounds in six months?
Patrick Deuel weighed half a ton on a livestock scale last June. By January, he had lost almost half his weight - down to 610 pounds.
It took a medical emergency to get him started, but losing 450 pounds made him a heavyweight champion of weight loss, and America was fascinated by the new celebrity.
You may ask: How did Deuel grow so big in the first place? Imagine gaining an average of 30 pounds every year for 30 years. What drives such a life?
To grow that big takes genes and hard work. For some big families, genes give them a head start. But nobody tops 1,000 pounds, or even 400 for that matter, without working hard at it. And I mean the forced hard work of compulsive overeating.
Against their wishes, most morbidly obese people have struggled through long periods of compulsive overeating, driven by cravings as powerful as the cravings of binge drinkers or smokers. Their brains are wired to eat beyond satiety, and resisting the urge causes unbearable distress. Food seems like the only solution.
Morbid obesity is a slow death, and it nearly killed Deuel.
Our ballooning nation has good reason to be fascinated by Deuel. He's a tragedy and a triumph, and a reminder that morbid obesity is a disorder of the brain. It's long, hard work, but if drinkers and smokers can beat their compulsions with intensive treatment, overeaters can, too.
Lawson Wulsin, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Cincinnati.
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