Fatty degeneration

“ The patchy distribution of the fatty degeneration in many cases, usually evident to the naked eye, is corroborated by the microscope, and one may obtain portions of the muscle with scarcely a normal fibre, while in a contiguous bit the fibres are little if at all affected. In some instances of general fatty degeneration in anæmia, and even in fevers, as diphtheria, the process is so advanced that it is difficult to find any normal-looking fibres. Brown atrophy is a frequent accompaniment of fatty degeneration. ”

“ A very large proportion of consumptives, most of them, in fact, are first thus diseased; and when any person is round and plump, or even fairly covered, so to say, and is yet lacking in muscular power—“easily tired”—it is prima facie evidence that the muscular system is degenerated in the manner described; and if the muscles, then the vital organs within, also. Thus we observe that grossness is by no means essential to fatty degeneration, although all obese persons are, of course, thus affected. ”

“ Some gain in flesh as life goes on is a frequent thing here as elsewhere, and usually has no unwholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do not pit on pressure. ”

“ Thus, in the case of the heart, when affected with fatty degeneration, there is atrophy of the proper muscular texture, which, however, being largely replaced by fatty matter, the organ may undergo no diminution in volume, but may, on the contrary, be increased in size. Atrophy is usually a gradual and slow process, but some times it proceeds rapidly. ”

“ In the same way, the over-consumption of fat-forming materials may disturb the fatty metabolism, and lead even to the changing of proteid materials into fat. This represents a real disease requiring careful management, while ordinary obesity needs only the exercise of the patient's will to secure such proportion between the amount of food taken, and the amount of exercise and fresh air, as will not only prevent accumulation of fat but will lead to the reduction of any accumulation that may, through neglect of this care, already have taken place. ”

“ When patients have understood that they were suffering no injury from not taking food they have ceased to have hunger cravings. These hunger cravings usually come from fear or from disorder caused by fermenting food in an overloaded stomach.
We can, then, on undisputed and practical authority, treat craving for food or drink as a disease and therefore not rational, and starvation as merely drawing upon the stored fuel—fatty tissue—by the dynamo of the brain, restorable at will at any time before complete exhaustion, without injury— [Pg 248] with benefit, in fact—to the machinery of the body. ”

“ And rest, as we have said before, is to nerves what food is to the stomach and oxygen to the lungs.
A common result of faulty digestion is a tendency to grow fat. Just as extreme thinness results from failure to digest food properly and so get the nourishment out{283} of it, so a certain kind of obesity is likewise a wrong digestion of food; and though the symptom of “laying on flesh” is often ignorantly considered a sign of health, it may be distinctly a sign of bad digestion, if the flesh that is laid on is fatty. Certain foods, such as sugar and oil, are in themselves fattening ”

“ FROM the days of Hippocrates, intelligent medical observers have noticed that an unusual accumulation of fat, far from adding to the strength of a person, was a source of physical weakness, and, to a certain extent, an outward sign of incapacity; that it limited activity and shortened life. It is only in comparatively modern times that scientific experimentalists have ascertained precisely how the system generally, and the heart particularly, is affected either by the overloading or infiltration of superfluous fatty matter upon or in its muscular substance. ”

“ When a person is young and taking active exercise, a good deal of surplus food can be worked off, and if the excess be too great, a bilious attack tends to prevent any more being taken, for a time at least.
But as we get on in life, the surplus food, if much is eaten, is deposited in various parts of the body as fatty or gouty accumulations. The liver becomes deranged, and loss of health and strength are at once apparent.
It is then, as Sir Henry Thompson has well pointed out, that the fond but foolish wife often does her husband incalculable harm by her efforts to "keep up his system." ”

“ Taken in moderation they are easily digested, but if taken in excess they become a burden to the system. About 7 or 8 per cent of the weight of a normal body is fat, and this fat is formed chiefly from the fatty foods taken into the system, supplemented by the sugar and starch.
When the body becomes very fat, it is a disease, called obesity. Fat people are never healthy. The fat usurps the place that should be occupied by normal tissues and organs. It crowds the heart and the lungs, and even replaces the muscle cells in the heart. ”

“ Then it is necessary to reduce the food intake until digestion and assimilation catch up with supply. Then if the eating is right the individual goes to the proper weight and retains it.
The slender people are in the safest physical condition. The vast amount of statistics gathered by the life insurance companies bears this out. Remember that fat is a low grade tissue, which sometimes crowds out high grade tissue, that an excess indicates degeneration and that obesity is a disease. All fat people eat too much, even though they consider themselves small eaters. ”

“ Excess of fat is a burden. It replaces other tissues and weakens the muscles. It overcrowds the abdominal and thoracic cavities, thus making the breath short and the working of the heart more difficult, also producing a tendency to prolapsus of the various abdominal organs.
People make the mistake of thinking that stoutness indicates health. It indicates disease. Going into weight is going into degeneration. Women like to be plump for various reasons, some of which are not the most creditable to either men or women. Fat people are not good looking. ”

“ The exact relations of fatty tissue to the states of health are not as yet well understood; but, since on great exertion or prolonged mental or moral strain or in low fevers we lose fat rapidly, it may be taken for granted that each individual should possess a certain surplus of this readily-lost material. It is the one portion of our body which comes and goes in large amount. ”

“ As we have shown in our previous researches, there is an abundant formation of fat in the early cases of degeneration of the thyroid gland, which sometimes progresses to a colossal obesity, which obesity has nothing to do with overfeeding. Such individuals have, as a rule, but poor appetites, and eat very little. ”

“ I have heard a physician telling his patient—whose complaint was merely gluttony and want of exercise—that 'the earliest symptom of hyper-nutrition is a deposition of adipose tissue,' and no doubt the fine long words greatly consoled the poor man under his increasing load of fat. ”

“ There is no struggle in this case between the several food constituents, and therefore no one of them suffers. In harmony also with daily experience the physician, in cases of weakness of the stomach, totally excludes fatty food and recommends meat of a fat-free kind; for example, game, etc. In pathological cases, however, where an excessive activity of the gastric glands is manifested, fatty food, or fat as emulsion, is prescribed. And here medicine has empirically brought to its aid the restraining action of fat, which we have so strikingly seen in our experiments. ”

“ People also fear weight loss during fasting because they fear becoming anorexic or bulimic. They won"t! A person who abstains from eating for the purpose of improving their health, in order to prevent or treat illness, or even one who fasts for weight loss will not develop an eating disorder. Eating disorders mean eating compulsively because of a distorted body image. Anorexics and bulimics have obsessions with the thinner-is-better school of thought. The anorexic looks at their emaciated frame in the mirror and thinks they are fat! ”

“ The practice of fat reduction is the most difficult thing in the world. Its difficulties are comprehended in two words: You cannot. The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak. The success of the undertaking lies in the triumph of the will over the appetite. There's a lovely line of cant for you! Triumph of the will over the appetite. It sounds like the preaching of a professional food faddist, who tells the people they eat too much and then slips away and wolfs down four pounds of beefsteak at a sitting. ”

“ The10 men, of small stature, are lithe, sinewy, and extremely active; the women have a decided tendency to become fat; one or two of them had attained to such a state of obesity, that walking was next to an impossibility. The children are the most singular little frights imaginable; guiltless of garments, they seemed all eyes and stomach, arms and legs being merely trifling unessential appendages; a singularity of form that may, I presume, be traced to the habit of consuming such vast quantities of innutritious vegetable food. ”

“ I never saw brighter eyes, a happier expression on every line, than{171} revealed by a woman after a fast of forty-four days, in which acute disease had reduced the weight forty pounds.
All overweight not due to dropsy or other disease is due to eating more food than the waste demands. As an abnormal condition overweight has received a great deal of attention in the way of misguided effort to both prevention and cure. These efforts are such conspicuous failures that even the patent medicine man has not found his "anti-fat nostrums" the happy means to fortune. ”

“ In some cases I have cured without fattening; in others, though rarely, the mental habits formed through years of illness have been too deeply ingrained for change, and I have seen the patient get up fat and well only to relapse on some slight occasion.
The intense persistency with which some women study and dwell upon their symptoms is often the great difficulty. Even a slight physical annoyance becomes for one of these unhappily-constituted natures a grave and almost ineradicable trouble, owing to the habit of self-study. ”

“ Fasting consists in intentional abstinence from food by a system diseased, and, as a result, non-desirous of sustenance until rested, cleansed, and again ready for the labor of digestion. Then, and not till then, is food supplied. Then, and not till then, does starvation begin. The law of hunger draws the line of demarcation.
It may be repeated that, in functional disease, the fast can be carried to its logical end without a, particle of anxiety, because the law of hunger marks the limit beyond which abstinence cannot continue lest the body die. ”

“ It strengthens the eyesight and increases the energy of the body, improves its power of digestion and heightens its glow and complexion. Fat is deranged by such acts as, an abuse of astringent, bitter, cold, parchifying or Vistambhi (indigestible food which remains stuffed in the stomach) substances, a voluntary repression of the natural urging for evacutions of the body, by excessive sexual indulgence, and fatiguing physical exercise, or by the draining action of any particular disease. ”

“ Yea, it is a kind of gluttony and excess, when men will not fast or abstain when they are required, from that which at other times they may use with abstinence and without blame. If a man use not to eat excessively nor deliciously, yet if he will not abstain from his temperate diet, either at a public fast, or when his lust requireth him to take down his body, or when his physician would diet him for his health, and his disease else would be increased by what he eateth, this is an inordinate eating and excess to that person, at that time. ”

“ I claim that a series of rational experiments should tell any rational human how much he needs to eat and what he needs to eat in order to reduce his bulk and yet keep his powers and his bodily vigor unimpaired. I am not speaking now, understand me, of those unfortunates with whom obesity is a disease, but of those who owe their grossness of outline to gluttony. ”

“ The worst habits of this type are those inevitable to the ease-loving and the immature-minded.
Indolence is one of his most undesirable traits and costs the Alimentive dear.
In this country where energy, push and lightning-like efficiency are at a premium only the fat man of brains can hope to keep up.
The inertia caused by his digestive processes is so great that it is almost insurmountable. The heavy, lazy feeling you have after a large meal is with the fat man interminably because his organism is constantly in the process of digesting large amounts of food. ”

“ Yeo, showing what textures of the body waste most rapidly in disease. Fat is at one end of the scale, and at the other the brain, which does not waste till all the other textures and organs are depleted to the utmost.
"In cases of slighter disease where the patient is able to be about or to carry on his business, but with discomfort, the same abstinence from all food is recommended. It is usually found that work can be done more easily, and that strength actually increases, although the starving may have to be kept up for several days. ”