According to Daily Mail "Fire crews are being asked to lift or help fat patients almost daily, new figures have revealed today. The fire service received 1,784 calls to help move obese people since 2004, costing authorities at least £4m."
"The figures were released to the Conservatives under the Freedom of Information Act.
Call-outs included one to a 30 stone woman in Staffordshire who had been lying on the floor all day, while another 25 stone woman in Kent needed help after becoming stuck in a bath.
Other calls were to help overweight patients down from upper floors, and release them from stair-lifts and toilets. One man in Oxfordshire had to be removed via window, which then had to be refitted. Each call-out was estimated to cost an average £2,289.
Essex fire service received the most distress calls, receiving 86 in 2008 alone."
This is not a task for which the fire service should be needed, nor a cost that should be made on public funds, and it is not a painful indignity that fellow men and women should have to endure. - Sadly, because the experts continue to link obesity with gluttony and indolence, and continue to advise eating fewer calories and less fat, the incidence and severity of obesity will continue to rise.
The fact is that people who become fat tend to be vulnerable to salt, and for them any salt intake above a low level leads to water/fluid retention and therefore to weight gain. The weight gain can be easily, safely and swiftly lost by avoiding salt and salty food, but since fat people are rarely, if ever, told that this is how they can lose weight, they continue to eat salt and keep trying to lose weight by dieting. By dieting I mean eating less food than the body requires. Since this does not reduce fluid retention it does not reduce weight gained because of fluid retention.
Groups vulnerable to salt include babies and small children, pregnant women, people who take or who have taken certain prescribed steroids, including prednisone and prednisolone, or certain other prescribed drugs, women who take or have taken HRT or other oestrogen-containing drugs such as some contraceptive medications, people who take or have taken amitriptyline or other tricyclic antidepressants, or some other psychotropic/psychoactive drugs.
If you are overweight and like other overweight people have found that dieting does not work, why not try losing excess weight the easy way? - Just give up dieting and cut down on salt and salty food.
Written by Margaret Wilde
Margaret is the author of www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
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