Morbid Obesity and Working Your Ass Off

Have been doing landscaping work on my property for about ten days now. I've been working up to more each day. Hand weeding, raking, and hauling these oversized scallop bricks. Been using 'Goblin Squats' for this (a wide stance squat, feet 45 degree angle outward, torso upright, and any weight held high close to the chest).

Did so much brick hauling yesterday and other stuff that I can barely move today and actually feel sort of traumatized. I clearly overdid it. But I got a lot accomplished and I'm kind of proud of myself for even being ABLE to do so much leg work that (combined with the rest of my body) I could feel this way.

I'm feeling muscles that I swear I have not felt in probably 15+ years.

When you get really fat, the first problem is that oxygenating that much mass is difficult. Inability to get enough oxygen stops nearly all exercise in its tracks, as the heart and lungs go nuts trying to move enough blood through fast enough to deal with a supersized body even moving at all, let alone moving while bearing extra weight. It literally becomes impossible to do more than the mildest exercise and, given how unhappy the heart is about not having oxygen for its own needs, not real safe.

The second problem is of course the weight you have to move, which is difficult because it's so much (heavy), plus, that insufficient protein (which is ever-present in the morbidly obese IMO) tends to make one weak, plus, that feet issues kick in due to that combination plus being OFF the feet becoming a norm, which means just 'the doing it' is hard as hell, totally apart from minor things like having oxygen while doing it.

The third problem is the mobility; from lack of limberness to whatever the word is when bodyfat is literally IN THE WAY so you can't turn or bend in certain ways easily or even at all. Worse, this creates both some lack of balance and a tendency to hurt yourself easily, when an underused muscle or tendon suddenly gets way too much weight imposed on it in some twist or surprise movement.

The fourth is metabolic: if Taubes is even half right (and probably he is, at least that much if not more), the primary reason some bodies get and stay fat and others don't, even in research on the same food etc., is because the body is storing the energy from food and not giving it to you "as energy" like it's supposed to. The body stores fat every time you eat; what varies between the thin and morbidly obese appears to be that in thin people, the body freely releases the energy taken in, which is why they "feel like" going out and doing something, have the energy to exercise, or whatever. In fat people, no matter how much 'energy food' you take in (carbs of course -- one reason I think extremely fat people are carb/sugar addicts is because that is 'pure energy food'), you can't get more than a fraction of it back out, so you seldom have much "energy" to do anything.

It's like a bank account where your paycheck auto-deposits everything you earn, but you can't get more than pennies of your money out again. So if you don't want to die in the street you have to frantically go work yet MORE to make more money to survive. But the same thing happens. People think you're "hoarding" all that money and have too much of it... but whatever force is making it unavailable to you is the problem. Hormones, whatever. That's where science needs to go. If the sources funding the science weren't the same ones killing us with pseudo-food and sugars and then medicating us with drugs, that might happen one day.

Anyway, when morbidly obese, one gets slow and cautious to avoid having a fall that could be very destructive. When really large, it only takes one bad fall to screw up a knee or back that can mess with you for the rest of your life. A wrong movement could be injurious. And it's a tax on the system that brings on the equivalent of a major asthma attack, just because you worked a little too fast or hard putting the groceries in the back of the car.

Thinner people wonder why people really fat aren't out there exercising already. Because they don't have the energy (#4 above), and because of the first 3.

So what this means is that when challenged to exercise, the actual muscles, UNLESS you are weight training, doing squats or hauling brick around your garden, never really even have the CHANCE to seriously work out. It's like there are all these issues with the body that stop you long before you get to even challenging let alone really taxing, the muscle.

Your lack of oxygen, your body impedence, weakness or overburden, stops someone morbidly obese waaaaaay before the point where say, all the muscles all the way around your thigh, and above your knee, could even get to that "Ye gods, I'm alive and it hurts!" stage.

This is harder on the lower half of the body because you can do arm exercises with much less demand, more gradually, and even while sitting. Lower body work (without a gym machine, and since we're talking about the morbidly obese here, many don't have a gym, are too embarrassed to visit a gym, too poor to afford one, or can't fit in the machines) has to support the ENTIRE body weight, and often the inability to do that right off means you don't exercise it hardly at all. It's not like arms, where you can lift a little and work up to a lot.

Even something like a single squat has to instantly bear your entire body weight -- on the knees and back as well as on the glutes and thighs and calves. So if you can't go from doing 'nothing' to squatting 250-450# instantly, someone morbidly obese is in a bit of a catch-22 and usually defaults to not exercising at all because it's impractical, dangerous, and unbelievably taxing.

Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Use the legs, not momentum and leaning the weight out, to stand. I do it as often as possible. In the kitchen if I'm going to be in there awhile, I have a folding chair. I make a point to sit and stand a dozen or two times rather than just casually standing by the stove -- it's more exercise.

At the store, I fill my cart heavily with birdfood, catfood and catlitter right up front so the whole shopping trip is hauling around a lot more weight, and then I use super walmart shopping as a workout of sorts, forcing turns fast and hard so I really have to use a little torso and shoulder muscle, walking quickly where I can, not avoiding walking all the way across the store for some trivial thing.

I've also been doing some degree of isometric exercises while sitting on my bed. This is where you basically just 'tense and hold' a muscle. I've been doing that with my buttocks and thighs for some time. Trying to exercise when I can and how I can.

Basically I've been working to bring as much exercise as I can into daily life.

And trying to eat enough protein -- minimum 60g but I really feel exponentially better on more like 120g -- to keep me strong enough to do it.

I really think it's helping. I really AM feeling a whole lot of muscles that I probably haven't felt sore in 15+ years. Not until now have I been strong enough, limber enough, and oxygen adapted enough, to go do the kind of work I'm doing.

PJ