It's funny though that now you seem to want to take this into a neener-neener "Oh yeah you think I like being fat...well you just don't want to parent your child" contest.
I'm not saying that people with hyperactive kids don't want to parent their kids, and I'm sorry if it came out that way. I think that expecting kids to sit still in school for hours on end isn't a natural state for children, and many kids have trouble coping with it. That's a problem with how schools are set-up, rather than a problem with how the kids have been raised.
Do I think that some kids really are outside the norm and have something different about them that makes them extremely hyperactive? Yes, I do. But, I don't think that's true of all kids getting medication.
Then you have obviously not read enough. As you mentioned before, since the stimulant is controlled and in low enough doses, it does not cause addiction. In fact, children who take medication for ADHD are less likely to become involved with drugs than children with ADHD who are not taking medication. Most children with untreated ADHD will look to "self-medicate" in order to try to make sense of how they feel.
I wasn't saying that there is much of an addiction risk for kids who take stimulants for ADHD. My point was that stimulants taken illegally for "getting high" are much more likely to cause addiction than stimulants taken orally under a doctor's supervision. I wouldn't expect stimulants taken for obesity OR for ADHD to be particularly addictive, as long as the doctor prescribing them knew what he or she were doing. If you've seen something saying stimulants for obesity are more addictive than stimulants for ADHD, I'll be happy to look at it.
By the way, yes, I have seen the research saying that kids who take stimulants for ADHD are less likely to get addicted to stimulants later in life than kids who have ADHD and don't take stimulants, and yes, I believe that. However, this isn't unique to ADHD or stimulants. For example, teenagers who can drink legally are less likely to binge-drink than teenagers in countries where they are forbidden to drink alcohol.
And I am basing my information on Dr. Russell Barkley a leading researcher and doctor in the field of ADHD.
The point I was referring to was whether stimulants work over the long term for weight loss; I was saying that they do, and you were saying that they don't. Research on ADHD isn't relevant for this point. I do want to clarify something I said, though. When I said that stimulants work over the long term for weight loss, I meant that they cause people to lose a "clinically significant" amount of weight (generally defined as 10% of starting weight) and allow people to keep it off. Stimulants don't allow people to just keep losing and losing weight, though -- the loss levels off after a while, just as it generally does with dieting. So, if a person expected to be able to get down to a Size 2 via stimulants and kept upping the dose to try to get there, then, yes, that would put them at risk of addiction. (Currently, the only treatment available that allows most people to lose more than 10% of their body weight over the long term is bariatric surgery.)
Hmmm and apparently you failed to read the part that said I am not opposed to medication if a child was obese for medical reasons.
I did read it. But, it seemed to me that you were saying that most children who are obese could become a normal weight if they would eat & exercise properly, and that if doctors can't find a medical reason for a child's obesity, that means there probably isn't one. I disagree with this. (If I misunderstood you, I apologize.)
I can tell you the reason for mine....I like to eat. But when I eat properly and exercise I lose weight and keep it off. The fact is that some people can eat what they want and it will burn right off and for some people it doesn't. Now those people can do a couple of things....they can keep eating what they want when they want and be obese or they can decide that they will eat healthier, make better choices and find a good balance. My choice up until September was to eat what I wanted when I wanted and I have only myself to blame for being a big woman.
My experience is different than yours, I guess. My experience is that when I diet, I get headaches, feel dizzy, can't sleep, can't concentrate, and my body temperature drops and I always feel cold. Like you, I've been dieting since September, but I only lost weight during the first few weeks, and I felt terrible all the time. During weeks 6 to 11 or so on my diet, I felt better (other than being freezing all the time), but no weight came off. A few weeks ago I started stimulants, and now I'm losing again. (Although I still can't seem to get my body temperature back up to normal.)
In my case, I feel that I have been "making good choices" about what I eat, for many years. Since I became a vegetarian 26 years ago, I've eaten non-starchy vegetables as the bulk of my food, by weight. I have also exercised regularly for about seven years, and I very strictly limit added sugars and refined starches. Yet, despite this, and despite the fact that the many doctors I have seen can find no medical explanation for any weight gain, I have become morbidly obese. What I'm finding now is that nobody believes that I have a healthy lifestyle. They look at me and figure that, since I'm fat, I must eat junk and not exercise. When I say that I'm having all sorts of physical problems from dieting, people assume that I must be doing something wrong.
I really didn't mean to start an argument.
But, I am just so extremely frustrated with the idea that obese people "should" be able to lose weight and keep it off just through diet and exercise. It seems like even overweight people themselves believe this, even though most of them have tried and failed to get to and stay at a normal weight.
