Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Jul
1
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“You Should Lose Weight, It’ll Be Best For All Of You.”
“You should lose weight, it’ll be best for all of you.” – Midwife to mother in the middle of the mother’s labor and birth.
There are 25 comments to this post.
Amber (Firewife) had this to say,
Jul 1, 2011 @ 2:49 pm (Quote)
I found out that it was only moderately difficult to lose 250 pounds basically overnight when I kicked out and subsequently divorced my cheating ex-husband. Firing a midwife might not help you lose quite as much weight if she’s smaller, but it should be a lot easier than a divorce!
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road2vba2c had this to say,
Jul 1, 2011 @ 5:07 pm (Quote)
Timing is everything, lady. At a pre-conception appointment, or even a postpartum appointment, this would be appropriate, and it’s even worded halfway decent. Timing…
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jaed Reply:
July 1st, 2011 at 6:47 pm (Quote)
I have to disagree. It’s never appropriate to criticize someone’s appearance at a medical appointment. (And that’s all it is, unless the medical practitioner has made some attempt to diagnose the cause of weight gain… in which case they’d probably be recommending an appropriate treatment, not “Shazam! lose weight!”)
It’s also worded very poorly, attempting to guilt-trip the mother into thinking that her body shape is somehow harming her family. Fat-shaming is bad in all its forms, but fat-shaming that tries to induce senseless guilt…ugh. Bad on all available counts. I’d be outraged no matter when this was said.
(I *have* heard of at least one incident like this that was even more inappropriate… telling a woman something like this during a GYN exam. A forensic exam, specifically. To collect medical evidence after a rape. Some medical professionals take the imperative to use every contact with a fat patient as an opportunity for bringing pressure to bear a little too seriously.)
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Kali Reply:
July 1st, 2011 at 7:31 pm (Quote)
I don’t think suggesting to lose weight is criticizing someone’s appearance. As a medical care giver, it should be ok for her to suggest something that would enhance the woman’s health. But it sure is terrible timing here!
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Jenny Islander Reply:
July 1st, 2011 at 7:47 pm (Quote)
Except that it doesn’t enhance health.
Plus, using the O word at any point in a woman’s effort to become pregnant and give birth lays her open to unnecessary, expensive, and possibly dangerous interventions. Well, maybe not at the exact point this midwife chose to bring it up. Unless she tripped the mother’s “fat=bad, inadequate, unworthy” programming and thus slowed down her labor.
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Vallery Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 5:56 am (Quote)
Wait…which “O” word? I’m usually good at this, but I just can’t think of what it stands for!
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Kali Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 6:30 am (Quote)
O= Overweight/Obese I guess.
I fail to see how, if someone was obese, losing weight would not enhance their health?? What am I missing here?
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Jenny Islander Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 9:42 am (Quote)
It’s true that people who don’t look fat tend to receive better medical care–for example, treating the problem they came in with instead of talking endlessly about how fat they are.
Tell you what. You give me a list of the things that being skinny is suppposed to do for a person and I’ll give you some links.
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Jenny Islander Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 11:23 am (Quote)
Just realized that in the area of being fat while pregnant, one person has done an incomparable job rounding up hard data and personal stories: The WellRounded Mama, http://wellroundedmama.blogspot.com/
The links from her site lead to other meaty sites about being fat in the presence of any medical provider and being fat in general.
In any case, there are things you do not do to a laboring woman. You do not harass her, distract her, or tell her that there is something wrong with her that can’t be immediately addressed. People don’t accept this crap being pulled on somebody who is so much as trying to build a house of cards. It is even less okay when pulled on somebody who is in labor!
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Melissa Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 11:58 am (Quote)
“It’s never appropriate to criticize someone’s appearance at a medical appointment. (And that’s all it is, unless the medical practitioner has made some attempt to diagnose the cause of weight gain… in which case they’d probably be recommending an appropriate treatment, not “Shazam! lose weight!”)”
Nail on the head there, jaed. If someone comments about your (actual or perceived) weight, it’s just a comment on their perspective on your appearance. If a knowledgeable health care provider has a real concern about the (too much or too little) weight a person is carrying, they are always welcome to *do their jobs* and look into WHY that person is at their current weight. My midwife asked me about my activity level and about my diet, how healthy I felt, what my health goals were. My friend’s OB looked at the scale, told her “since you’re obese, you can only gain XYZ or else I’m going to put you on a diet.” Well gee, thanks…how ’bout if you found out first whether it was even a matter of poor eating/exercising choices in the first place? Or maybe (gasp!) you could make some suggestions for being healthy, right now…delicious, nutritious foods to include, some guidelines for things to avoid, some suggestions for gentle, doable physical activity appropriate to a busy mom.
My mom’s been overweight most of her adult life. And I’m sure she’s had her share of idiot health practitioners yelling at her about it. Probably thinking to themselves something along the lines of “haven’t you ever heard of SALAD, fatty?!” But how many of them ever asked what she ate? Salad. Her weight is a symptom of some serious health problems…basically, her digestion is shot. And her hormones are all out of whack. (Even though, in her kitchen, there wasn’t any sugar or white flour ANYWHERE until I was about 12…that’s how careful she was.) But the uphill battle to get the “experts” who were supposed to help her to be healthy see past the “problem” of the numbers on the scale and look into WHAT WAS CAUSING THEM….well, it’s been awful. And in the meantime, if you’re fat, your APPEARANCE makes you an acceptable target for anyone, especially anyone in a health field, to point their finger at you and tell you “you’re fat! Don’t you know that’s unhealthy? You need to lose weight! Stop eating potato chips!” There’s a society-wide acceptance that *for their own good* we all should use a subset of the population, because of their appearance, as target practice. Instead, we should help them (and ourselves; it’s not like skinnier Americans take better care of themselves, on the whole!) by doing everything we can to encourage real food and discourage fake, packaged food; to support healthy activity in the workplace rather than enforced inactivity behind a computer, encourage safe outdoor fun for our children, etc. Instead of treating fat people like dead weight on society (the game life raft, anyone?) as if, were we able to just get rid of “them”, we would all be better off and all our problems solved…we should do what we can to make ourselves and our culture,the way we think about food, about activity…healthier.
I recently had an idiot doc at the ER tell me I couldn’t have anything wrong with my gall bladder because I’m too thin. For the record, I’m 30lbs overweight. I look pretty good, and swaddled in a hospital gown, you can’t see my chubby thighs. So he could tell *by looking at me* that I didn’t have a health problem, because, *by looking at me* I wasn’t overweight. Except right there on the chart in his hand were my stats: 5’4″, 170lbs. And I had both the symptoms and the family history. But he disallowed the possibility because of how I looked. MY doc (actually an NP; she rocks!) isn’t an idiot. She’s sending me for the HIDA scan (or whatever it’s called) to check on my gall bladder.
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Julie had this to say,
Jul 2, 2011 @ 5:31 am (Quote)
I have to agree with Kali. I’m overweight by about 60-70 pounds. My doctor tells me I should loose weight all the time and you know what? It’s true. I’m healthy ish, but I could be healthier, and that’s kind if the point (and part of her job).
I think there’s a huge difference between real fat-shaming and someone stating something true.
Unfortunately some people see fat-shaming everywhere.
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Susan Peterson Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 2:37 pm (Quote)
People who need to lose weight, know they need to lose weight. Or at least they know other people think so. For a medical person to say just that is absolutely useless.
Now maybe this, at an appointment in the office, when not pregnant “Your blood pressure is a little high. It is higher than it was last year when you weighed ten pounds less. Would you be willing to try to lose that ten pounds? If so, I have some suggestions for how you could go about it…”
Oh, and message to a certain eye doctor; an exam for cataracts is not an excuse to tell someone they are overweight, and when they say they have lost and gained it again, to smirk “Well then you didn’t do it the right way” from the exalted viewpoint of your only slightly beginning to thicken waist and your 34 years. I wonder what you will look like at 60? Grrr….didn’t go back, and didn’t pay him either.
Our bodies are made to accumulate fat for that famine which never comes in our country. They are also made to be moving all day long. So you take a body naturally programmed like that, tie it to an office chair and present it with abundant food. Getting fat is easy, losing weight is really difficult.
And to present a woman with this problem DURING LABOR? It means the midwife is looking at the patient’s fat and fearing that she will get fat herself, and being made uncomfortable, until these words come out of her mouth to relieve her own discomfort. There is no way it was said with any intention of benefitting the patient.
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jaed Reply:
July 2nd, 2011 at 2:57 pm (Quote)
You may very well have some health-related weight gain, and treating whatever has caused the weight gain might very well improve your health. However, simply barking “Lose weight!” at such a patient is useless, in fact worse than useless because it adds shame to whatever health problems the person has. The doctor on seeing the symptom should be analyzing and diagnosing the cause and offering appropriate treatment, not complaining to the patient that the symptom exists and demanding she wave her magic wand and change her body shape!
(And before anyone says it, trying to “eat less” than your body needs is not a treatment for any of the problems that can cause weight gain. It is not possible to continue such behavior indefinitely in the absence of an eating disorder. At best, you get temporary weight loss. At worst, you permanently change your body composition, and during the refeeding process, as the weight comes back, you end up with more fat and less muscle than when you started, as well as an enhanced propensity to build up fat stores. Plus whatever health problems might have caused the gain in the first place. This is not good – or even sane – medical advice.)
Sorry about the rant – but this mindset can be very harmful, and particularly when promulgated by medical personnel to patients who believe them. I’ve seen it in my own life so it’s a sore point.
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When is this occurring? First phase, transition, second phase…? Is this between 10-minute apart contractions while discussing what Mom’s going to be doing postpartum, or while she’s dealing with transition, or concentrating on pushing out a baby? I’m guessing whenever it was was a BAD time, but I’d love a touch of context.
I guess if she wanted to make an impression on the Mom, it sure worked, though maybe not how she hoped.
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You know how much it hurts when the first thing the doctor/nurse says upon seeing/weighing you is how much you need to loose weight and then when they open your chart and see why you are there and it says “Out of control Thyroid causing mass weight gain at 1200 calories a day.” Oh jeez you mean it might now be her fault? Someone has a medical condition that is causing weight gain… never heard that one. What about when you are in the grocery store picking up a cake and some cookies and Ice cream for your kids birthday party and a random person oinks at you and then the checker says “Are you sure you need all that?” When you have the above stated health issues?
Should I have to tattoo on my forehead that I have a health condition and I am not fat on purpose? Why don’t I deserve the same dignity and courtesy that a normal person receives?
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Melissa Reply:
July 3rd, 2011 at 10:43 pm (Quote)
Ugh. So sorry, Sarahbeth.
I’d be thinking about that tattoo, too…
except why should it be on YOU to protect yourself from moral busybodies and their nosy, nasty assumptions? Grrrrrrrrr.
Makes me think of that C. S. Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
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Oh cool, this one is mine 
the incident took place during a shift change and these were her parting words, lovely. The funny thing is she had quite a fat arse herself so that was something. I don’t know at what point it took place other than 7 hours into an 11 hour labour with no pain relief and my baby was in the back to back position = constant pain with no respite. I had been sick 4 times, my back has never been in so much pain, it was torture. Then the next midwife comes in and immediatly tells me to stop screaming as if it was something that could be helped. All around a very positive birthing experience.
Honestly, everyone who’s overweight knows it’s not a healthy lifestyle. Hell, I know and I’ve made strides to change etc. However, I don’t think it’s any business of a midwife who I’d never met before IN THE MIDDLE OF LABOUR. if I could speak I’d have cursed her out so bad her mother would have felt it. And in 7 weeks when number 2 is due should one of them feel the need to say some ignorant shit like that to me again they’re going to wish they hadn’t.
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Add Your Comment.
Seriously!? You say this to me right now?
Well guess what? I’m about to “lose” some weight in the form of giving birth.
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Kristin Reply:
July 1st, 2011 at 1:44 pm Kristin(Quote)
If that even counts…
You know, since I’ll be wearing my baby and all
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