The life story of a typical 30-year-old fat man. A look into the future

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

We so often save time with you on something more important. But we completely forget that it is very unreasonable to carve out minutes and, on the other hand, to lose years of our life coffin ourselves from our very youth. The story below is an attempt to imagine the future of a person who has slightly moved away from a healthy lifestyle in life and look only 10 … 20 … 30 … 40 years ahead. I was struck by this story and I began to represent my brothers, my parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents. I know what is with them today and I know only part of their life, but how great it would be to know their whole life and all those wrong decisions made by them at 30. We wrote the future today, but your task is to do the opposite. Such a life hack.

When you are thirty, you are young and healthy, excess weight brings exclusively aesthetic dissatisfaction and difficulty in buying clothes … You don’t think what awaits you in ten years. You lie on the couch and watch TV for hours or sit at the computer and do not want to limit yourself in pleasures and your weaknesses. And the boring statistics about the increased risk of developing some kind of disease, due to obesity, says little. Meanwhile, with every year and every extra kilogram, the risk of these diseases increases in a steady (arithmetic?) Progression.

Maybe you should try to look into the future?

So, if I'm a thirty-year-old fat man, then in …

35 years

Plus 5 kg. You still eat McDonald's burgers and a liter of Coca-Cola. And you absolutely don't understand why your head periodically starts to hurt, when you run to the bus you get "flies" before your eyes and dizziness, sometimes there are bouts of weakness, and with excitement your face turns red and you feel a rush of blood to your head. For fun, having measured the pressure in a pharmacy, you are surprised to find numbers 140/80 millimeters of mercury, and maybe even higher (note: the norm is 120/80 mm Hg) You go to the doctor, he prescribes pills to reduce blood pressure and recommends losing weight and do physical education. You take pills irregularly, only if you feel unwell. Well, physical education continues to be limited to jogging to the nearest stall with beer and chips.

40 years

Plus 10 kg more … The first call to the ambulance because of an unbearable headache. The first hypertensive crisis, when the tonometer rolls over 180 mm Hg. Art. You are taken to the emergency room of a local hospital, given an injection to relieve blood pressure, observed for several hours, and sent home under a written waiver of hospitalization. At home, you lie in bed for three days, unable to move your arm or leg. Buy a tonometer and start measuring your blood pressure regularly. It rarely drops below 140/90 mm Hg. You start taking the tablets daily. High cholesterol and sugar are found in the blood. The doctor, seeing your figure in the shape of an apple (deposits are more on the abdomen, not on the hips) speaks of an increased risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis, the risk of heart attacks, strokes, etc. The diet is prescribed, which you try to follow for the first two weeks. Then it becomes easier for you, the fear of a repeated hypertensive crisis passes, you relax and continue to live as before.

However, after a while, you notice that it becomes more and more difficult to climb the stairs. Knees hurt, shortness of breath and tingling in the heart appear already on the third floor. You read something on the Internet about arthrosis, osteochondrosis and coronary heart disease (this is when the heart muscle does not have enough oxygen and during physical exertion it starts to signal us with pain in the left side of the chest).

The idea that you need to do something comes into your head more and more often. Comes … and leaves …

50 years

Plus another 10 kg. The pressure keeps getting higher, and there are more pills on the bedside table. To maintain blood pressure at a normal level, you have to take up to 5-8 different drugs per day. Hiking without heart pain is getting shorter. Your knees hurt and crunch more and more and now you can no longer get out of the chair without helping yourself with your hands, and in the morning you have a whole ritual of sliding out of bed so as not to exacerbate pain in your back, knees and cause sudden dizziness. Blood sugar is steadily kept at an elevated level and you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The doctor highly recommends losing weight and gives a leaflet with prohibited foods. Everything that you so loved to feast on on long autumn-winter-spring-summer evenings fell under a complete ban: sweets, sugar, flour, fatty foods, fried potatoes, carbonated drinks, etc. Cholesterol-lowering drugs are prescribed. You are regularly greeted in the doctor's queue, and the ambulance dispatcher will already recognize your voice. You go on a diet, you suffer from hunger, but losing weight is getting harder and harder.

The doctor at the fitness club that you finally decided to visit after listening to your complaints and reviewing the diagnoses recommends you a health group at the nearest clinic. The orthopedist suggests replacing knee joints with prostheses, which are already affected by arthrosis of the third degree. The neurologist prescribes a course of regular droppers and adds a couple of more drugs to the bedside table in connection with the appearance of new complaints and cholesterol plaques in the vessels of the brain. Increasingly, you have to seek help from loved ones so that they can help you change clothes, put on socks (the stomach is in the way), treat the skin in fat folds. Naturally, for ladies, shoes with heels have long been forgotten and more and more often they have to take a cane with them, even for short walks.

60 years

Myocardial infarction. A plaque of cholesterol has come off and clogged one of the vessels that feed the heart. Intolerable chest pain, ambulance, resuscitation or operating table. Long-term treatment, disability. Walking, mainly to the clinic. Persistent headaches, shortness of breath, dizziness, pain and burning in the feet and the appearance of non-healing leg ulcers due to diabetes mellitus. The tablets are taken before, after and instead of food. At night, sleep is periodically interrupted by the frightened voice of your spouse: “You have stopped snoring, what's wrong with you? The doctor diagnoses obstructive sleep apnea. Sometimes, the total time without breathing is several hours a night! Constant awakening, lack of oxygen, drowsiness during the day, impairment of memory and attention - all this becomes a daily reality of a complete person with "Pickwick" syndrome. Planned joint replacement surgery is canceled due to contraindications. You are offered to inject special drugs into your knees. The pain goes away, but not for long. Six months later, you have to inject again. I will simply keep silent about the numerous hospitalizations, ambulances and calls to district therapists.