Sweat slid down Kelley Perrigin’s face and formed a droplet on her nose at the Fitness Factor on Saturday morning. She curled the dumbbells in her hands, alternately bringing them up toward her face.
Perrigin, an employee at Metso Paper, can remember being overweight since she was 9 or 10.
“Since then, it’s been my whole life,” she said. “And it just kept getting worse.”
At 42, she decided to do something about it, and over the past three years, she has lost 115 pounds thanks to a strict regimen of daily exercise and healthy eating habits.
“I’ve still got 30 or 40 to go,” Perrigin said. “At one point, I weighed 300 pounds.”
Perrigin is bucking a steadily rising trend of weight gain. This summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its national obesity statistics for 2009. Mississippi ranked dead last, just as it has for the previous six years. The CDC classified 34.4 percent of the state’s population as obese. Ten years ago, no state had a 30-percent obesity rate. By 2005, only three states had broken that ceiling. Now there are nine, and Mississippi brings up the rear.
The CDC reported that obese individuals spent an extra $1,429 on medical care in 2009. In 2008, the national obesity-related medical costs totaled $147 billion. Not only does being overweight cost more, but it also leads to poor health. Corpulence results in high blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides, the main component of vegetable oil and a major cause of heart disease. It also reduces life expectancy, and it can open the body up to cancer.
When Perrigin was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes in 2007, she saw herself going down the same road her father did.
“My dad was a diabetic and died in 2001,” she said. “I just didn’t want to go that way. There’s something else out there besides taking pills and pricking your finger all day.”
Life with diabetes is a life of numbers. You have to count your carbohydrates, because it raises the sugar in your blood. You have to check your blood sugar as soon as you wake up to see how what you ate the night before has affected it. Then, you can eat — but only certain foods, because they affect each diabetic differently. You have to make sure your blood sugar is at a certain range before bed, so you don’t bottom out before morning. And there are the lows. The shakiness makes you feel like you’re going to collapse, your stomach aches because your brain is trying to pull the sugar from wherever it can. It’s all about strategy and counting.
“People have no idea what being a diabetic is like,” Perrigin said. “It’s not like you can forget about it, because something could happen in a few minutes.”
Now Perrigin eats differently. Before the gym in the morning, she downs a smoothie made from fresh fruit, milk and whey protein. At 10 a.m., she takes a light snack, then lunch, another snack in the afternoon and finally a big dinner.
“I don’t eat anything that’s processed at all,” she said. “Having had medical issues, I’m really good about not eating anything with chemicals.”
People treat Perrigin differently since she lost weight and freed herself from the shackles of diabetes. Strangers will open the door for her. She gets smiles, whereas she used to be ignored. She thinks it has something to do with a pervasive stereotype that fat people are lazy slobs, and she wishes more people understood there’s always something that makes a person get big. For her, the reason was emotional; her parents divorced when she was a little girl.
Although she believes society needs to be more supportive and encourage people to lose weight in a healthy way, Perrigin says it ultimately all comes down to a personal decision.
“People have to realize what they want for their lives,” she said. “Right now it might be easier to sit on this couch, but what’s going to be better in the long run? It’s deciding what you want your future to be.”
Health vs. Mississippi
Homer Beatty, the owner of Fashion Barn on Fifth Street, made his own decision to lose weight. Last year, Beatty bent over to tie his shoes. When he finished, he stood upright and noticed something: He was winded.
So, he went running. He did two miles in 30 minutes and burned about 250 calories. After he finished, he went home where his wife, Joanne, wanted to show him something on TV. He grabbed a bag of chips and munched away while they watched. Ten handfuls later, he realized he had just eaten more calories than he burned on his run.
On Friday, Beatty turned to his wife and asked, “Would you say I was obese?”
“No,” she replied.
By health standards, he was. According to the National Institute of Health, a body mass index of 30 or greater is an indicator of obesity. Beatty’s index was 31.4 — just over.
But by Mississippi standards, he wasn’t. At 5 feet 11 inches and 225 pounds, he was a normal red-blooded Mississippian. But Beatty is nearly 60, and he decided to make a change.
“I don’t want to have a stroke,” he said. “I want to be a good pop for my grandkids, and I want to be able to run with sons-in-law if not faster.”
Beatty went to they YMCA and signed up for a personal trainer. He started doing cardiovascular training and muscle-building. He scaled back his diet, too. He’ll still have a burger every now and then, but he’s just as likely to put some olive oil in a skillet, toss in a couple handfuls of spinach, some walnuts and some eggs.
Stephanie Markham, a registered and licensed dietitian at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle, tells her patients to watch their portions. Sides should be about half a cup each, and she recommends only eating 2 to 3 ounces of meat at a meal.
“When we tell them what 3 ounces of meat looks like, they’re not usually very happy about that,” Markham said.
A matter of culture
The culture of food in the Mississippi is not one that caters to healthy eating. Ten of the 11 states at the bottom of the heap are in the South. As delicious as the region’s delicacies are, something is off when all the food on the lunch plate is fried. This is a society where a combo meal at the drive-through is cheaper than the ingredients needed for a nutritious meal.
“With this issue of obesity, a lot of times making the right choice isn’t the easy choice,” said Liz Sharlot, a spokesperson for the Mississippi State Department of Health. “Often, it costs more to eat healthier.”
It’s not just food. It’s an issue of economy, of infrastructure, of education. Sharlot looked to Colorado, a state on the other end of the obesity spectrum, as an example.
“If you go to Colorado, their infrastructure is completely different, and their culture isn’t based on what ours is,” Sharlot said. “A lot of activities here center around food. We need to acclimate our taste buds to fruits and vegetables. But it’s also a question of, do we have sidewalks? Do we have places people can go to ride their bikes, walk and be physically active?”
Because of this, the health department has embarked on several campaigns to reach the state’s younger residents. In schools, health officials have swapped fryers for grillers. They’ve instituted nutritional standards for school meals and made changes to the food stocked in vending machines. Some have suggested that schools open their gyms to the public in the evenings as a way to combat a lack of access to workout facilities.
Health workers are trying to reach children at the day-care level, and they’re encouraging more mothers to breastfeed, because studies have shown children who breastfeed are less likely to become obese later in life. This kind of approach relies on the hope that kids will take their learning home with them and encourage parents to change their habits.
“It’s the teach-up philosophy we used with seat belts,” Sharlot said. “The whole idea with that is that we got the kids to say, ‘Mom and Dad, you’re supposed to wear your seat belts.’ We did the same thing with tobacco.”
The problem with obesity is that t
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