We don't need to repost our disclaimer about not trusting a random blogger for medical advice, do we? If you don't know me--and by know me, I mean, "are related to me"--then I recommend strongly that you and your doctor research these things for yourselves. I COULD be a kook, you know. I'm not, but I could be.
You may have guessed that, when I said I'd post about weight and hypertension yesterday, that I hadn't quite internalized the realities of taking someone to the potty every twenty minutes all day, and handing out (and managing) potty prizes.
For instance, the idea that you have to take all the prizes with you whenever you go to the potty, so your little brother won't touch them. Or that choosing between two potty chairs can be like a gourmet trying to decide whether to order the Chablis with the brie.
Anyway.
No, according to Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon, being heavier does not cause high blood pressure. The two things often occur at the same time, but what's our mantra? Correlation is not causation.
Thin people frequently have high blood pressure too, and the evidence shows that when heavy people lose weight via dieting, their blood pressure measures get a lot worse--even while they're temporarily thin. (Because, as we know, 99.9% of people will regain weight they lose.)
One possibility is that larger people may just have slightly higher blood pressures than thin people and that this is not pathological--it just takes a higher pressure to move the blood through their tissues. Makes sense, since there's further for the blood to go.
Bottom line? Don't try to lose weight to improve your blood pressure readings. Indeed, you may want to do some research to figure out if they are definitely pathological. If they're like, 220/170, they probably are. If they're 131/90, perhaps not so much. Also, if you have other conditions like diabetes or kidney problems, you may have to manage your blood pressure in ways that a person without those conditions wouldn't have to. So, before you throw your blood pressure pills away, be sure that it's a good idea. (Also be sure that they're the kind you can just stop, like lisinopril, and not the kind that give you rebound hypertension, like atenolol--a call to your doctor would be a great idea.)
It looks like (surprise surprise) stress and genetics play a much larger role in blood pressure than weight.
What about high blood sugars/diabetes?
Well, the research seems to be that weight gain is actually an early symptom of type 2 diabetes, not the cause of it. Also, losing weight 1) doesn't improve blood sugar readings long term and 2) makes you more likely to die of diabetes than a heavier person and 3) the weight cycling which is overwhelmingly likely (losing and then gaining back) is incredibly harmful to your blood pressure and other measures, which are more fragile in diabetics than in non-diabetics.
So don't lose weight to improve your diabetes. Instead, concentrate on eating quality food and increasing your activity in pleasurable ways.
In fact, for pretty much every medical problem that people routinely blame on weight, "eat quality food and increase your activity in pleasurable ways" is the answer, regardless of whether these two things decrease weight.
The nice thing about it is that as you learn to accept your appetite and trust your body, and pay attention to what you eat, these two things sort of happen by themselves. I'll talk more about it later, but right now I'm afraid that thinking too much about food quality will simply get you back to thinking about quantity and hearing the old lie: "Stop eating so much, and don't eat food that tastes good." So don't worry about it. Concentrate on trusting your body. That's hard enough. And lay aside the fear that you're making your blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, or whatever, worse.
(Psst: nope, there's no connection between being fat and having clogged arteries either--that's logical but not particularly scientific thinking along the lines of "mud produces toads". Having fat on your body doesn't translate into fat in your arteries. In fact, fat people have cleaner arteries usually than thin people, go figure.)
Generally speaking, if you're going to get a disease you're probably going to get it no matter what you do. Hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and all that, are mainly diseases of aging. The reason that we see more of them these days is because people are living long enough to get them. But losing weight and weight cycling in particular are all either useless or actually harmful if you are susceptible to these diseases. It's okay to stop trying to lose the weight.
Cheers,
Breanna
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