Team Beachbody ¡preestreno!Español Guest

It wasn’t so long ago that I was overweight, bordering on technically obese. Now that I’ve lost weight and gotten healthy, I notice things.  For example, yesterday I took my mother to a large (by Maine standards) hospital for hip replacement surgery.   (It went very well by the way.)  I had lunch at the hospital cafeteria and while there I could not help but notice that a lot of the health care workers were overweight.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that it looked like roughly one in five needed to eat less and exercise more.

They seemed to run the gamut from doctors to nurses to technicians.  It wasn’t as if there were no choices on the menu from which they could choose low fat, high nutrient meals.  Despite the availability of a salad bar and two healthy entrees (baked haddock and pork loins, both with two vegetables) the majority of these folks seemed to have chosen from two other food groups: fried and deep fried.  I was somewhat surprised, because I would have expected that if anyone should be aware of health issues it would be health care workers.

I appreciate that these folks have some stressful jobs with long hours, which could very well be a contributory factor.  However, from a patient’s point of view, how much faith can one have in health care advice and instruction from someone obviously in need of same? Robert M. Centorm, MD writing in Medscape Today discusses this issue of overweight doctors as one of role model status as much as anything else.  He asks “How can we recommend lifestyle changes to our patients if we do not believe in those changes strongly enough to apply them to ourselves?”  It’s a fair question, very much in the context of “do as I say, not as I do”.