Healthy Room

You’re home from work and have the house to yourself. You’ve been very disciplined during the day. Just plenty of water to drink and a few biscuits. The scales show those pounds yielding to the diet. And then you find yourself opening the kitchen door. There’s a tub of ice cream in the freezer that’s got your name on it. When that’s gone, there’s that piece of cheesecake and a peanut butter sandwich or two to round things off. By the time you’ve finished, the good work of the day has been undone with an intake of calories sufficient to keep a small army going for a week. But, and here comes the sad truth, you have to support being overweight with your lifestyle. If you have a little self-discipline, there’s no reason to carry all that extra weight around. It’s the boom and bust approach to dieting that does the most harm, with binge eating one of the most common of the eating disorders. Why do we do it?
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Everywhere you look, there are more and more stories about the risks to the health of overweight people. It has not yet begun to match the continuous assaults by the Surgeon General on smoking (have you seen some of those pictures of people with cancer? – gross). But you know that the more weight you carry the greater the risks of diabetes, high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks. Unfortunately, these drum beats have lost their power to drive us to fight in the war against those pounds. We have all heard it before, tried the “I’m dieting” T-shirt on for size, and yo-yoed up and down a few pounds just to join the “I’m proud” movement to make the best of a bad job. If it was easy to lose weight, everyone would be thin. Anyway, it turns out there’s yet another set of disorders threatening the overweight. It’s called obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). It’s been around for as long as people have been sleeping, but it’s only surfaced as a serious health problem during the last few decades. The first signs are unmistakable. It’s that really loud snore. The one you can hear as you walk down the street. The snores go like a buzz saw for a time, then there’s a period of absolute silence. If you were observing the sleeper, you would notice that he or she has actually stopped breathing. This can go on for as long as a minute. Then, with an effort, the chest heaves and breathing begins again.
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