Not-fat people often scoff at fat people. These not-fat people are jerks, of course. But beyond the basic sensitivity issue, anyone who scoffs at someone (especially someone poor) who is heavy and unhealthy demonstrates that they are also unthinking, closed-minded jerks who are unable to identify or grasp nuisances and circumstances in life.
Read carefully, jerks:
Unhealthy people know they are unhealthy. They recognize their girth.
Unhealthy people also know they want to be healthy. They recognize their goal.
What poor, unhealthy people often do not recognize are affective strategies for reaching that goal.
Consider my client stuck in this sad cycle: She has severe leg pain and is very fat. Her bulk strains her legs when she walks and confines her to a motorized wheel chair. The more she sits, the more she expands. The more she expands, the more her legs hurt when she tries to walk and exercise. So she walk less, sits more, gains weight and gets depressed thinking about the whole shitty situation.
So how the hell do you transform yourself from fat to fit?
Once a week, I run a healthy living group, which I tentatively call the Michelle Obama Health Club since Michelle is ripped and pretty popular in Harlem. Before the first group, I knew I'd contend with huge gaps in their nutritional knowledge and decision-making abilities. Yet, I was stunned by their basic nutrition and health ignorance. They simply never learned about healthy living at school or at home.
Last week, for example, I asked members to guess the salt contents of various super-salty foods. I wasn't getting technical, just looking for basic "there's a lot" or "whoa. tons." Unfortunately, most members didn't even know that ketchup has salt. For decades, they've hit up McDonald's where they order potato salt-sticks, shake table salt on the salt-sticks then dip the salted salt sticks in red salt gel. They're ignorant to the volume of kidney-blasting white crystals they were pouring into their blood streams.
One guy didn't realize there was sodium in soy sauce -- known from here on as brown salty death water (BSDW). When I told him he that he consumes at least half his suggested daily intake of sodium from a few squirts of soy sauce, he looked at me blankly, told me he didn't know what that meant and said he had never learned any healthy eating habits before.
"The doctor told me I have high blood pressure, gave me a list of foods and told me not to eat salt," added another member who is illiterate and thus unable to read a stark list of prohibited food some busy doctor handed him once when he was 45-years-old.
That seems common. Poor, unhealthy people may have received health information, but they received it in a vacuum without any support, background or context. It would be like giving the original Castilian text of Don Quixote to an adult who took Spanish in middle school then asking the clueless adult to write an essay about it. How do you even begin?
I think that's the core of the Poor Health Problem -- by which I mean, "bad health" in general and "health of the poor" specifically. Let's tackle this total lack of information and learn to recognize strategies for gradual weight loss and prolonged healthy living!
My mission: To promote realistic lifestyle adjustments that lead to gradual, lasting health results.
At the beginning of each meeting, I give members a weekly healthy living calendar so they can track their good choices and healthy behaviors. For instance, one man takes the stairs to his apartment on the third floor at least once-a-day rather than ride the elevator every single trip. Another woman with hypertension began buying no-sodium frozen vegetables (10 for $10!) instead of high-sodium canned veggies. Small but vital lifetsyle adjustments! That's what we're all about. Another guy did 10 squats during commercial breaks. Most members have walked to the subway one stop away from their usual station then stood on the train.
We meet for about 90 minutes to review the healthy choices we made during the past week, learn simple at-home exercises and focus on various health obstacles like processed foods, added sugar and high sodium content. Since this one-hour meeting is the most nutrition education they have ever received, they typically ask questions about specific food.
"Is oatmeal healthy?" someone asked. We then discussed the benefits of high-fiber whole grains before considering all the other crap that gets added to instant oatmeal -- sugar, corn syrup, salt, oil -- not to mention all the butter, jelly, milk and sugar people add themselves.
After talking. stretching and exercising, we take walking field trips.
My second mission: To demonstrate Healthy Living on a budget. It's possible!
All of the group members are on fixed-incomes like pensions, veterans' benefits, SSI and disability insurance. On the slim positive side, they can't afford to get duped into any BS short-term fad diets (How did these super expensive, high-sugar, low-fiber, low-protein Juice Diets gain traction?). On the realistic negative side, it also means they continue to buy "food" that they know is cheap and that they have eaten for decades -- tubs of cooking oil, canned corn, various chicken parts, bread crumbs, mayo.
Last week, I handed out supermarket circulars to four members and we searched for savings together. We found great stuff like 2 cans of solid white tuna in water for $3 (gotta wash the salt off, one woman reminded us) and $2 bags of spinach. Next, I gave each member $8 and walked to the store where we combed the aisles, compared Chobani plain Greek yogurt to Yoplait sugarberry yogurt and discussed the merits of No Salt Added Goya beans (only ten cents more per can!).
Finally, everyone checked out and I was impressed by their thrift and ingenuity. Each member stuck close to the $8 guide and told me they were surprised by how many tasty items they bought. Here are a few sample baskets:
$8.81 for three apples, one avocado, one onion, romaine lettuce, two cans of tuna and one can of no salt added kidney beans. Perfect ingredients for a chili and side salad.
$8.82 for five bananas, a bag of baby carrots, one green pepper, one tub of non-fat cottage cheese and two cans of tuna. Delicious cottage cheese with banana breakfast idea.
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