It may be hard for you to believe in this morbidly obese country that we
live in but there do exist people who have trouble gaining weight and
need help to do it. This is true in famine ravaged countries in say
Africa for obvious reasons but it is less intuitive in this country
where there is no shortage of calorie rich food. So who are these people
who want/need to gain weight?
Well there are at least three
major groups of people in America that need help to gain weight. These
are athletes, persons with iatrogenic and disease-caused cachexia,
people, who are unable to feed themselves correctly, and lastly people
whose bodies are using calories at a higher rate than "normal" people
and not counting athletes. So lets take a few minutes to at least
consider these groups of people.
First and perhaps most obvious
are athletes who have trouble gaining weight on a normal diet because
they are burning off as much or more calories than they are taking in.
Athletes, especially those at the elite level, often consume ungodly
amounts of food just to supply their bodies with enough fuel to work at
supernormal levels of physical activity and support fantastically high
rates of metabolism. Second are those with diseases that cause a loss
of appetite such as anorexia for an obvious one or mental illness or
cancer with associated cachexia that are maybe less obvious. In the case
of anorexia nervosa there needs to be cognitive behavioral therapy that
changes the basic structure of thought for these people that makes them
think that they are fat. For mental illness a mixture of both behavior
therapy and drugs that stimulate the appetite and helps the person want
to consume enough calories to gain weight. For cancer patients these
appetite stimulating drugs are really the solution if they work.
The
group that is unable to feed themselves is the third group to discuss
and these are mainly people at the extremes of age. It is obvious that
babies need to be fed in order for them to gain weight but it is perhaps
less obvious in the elderly who often survive on what is known as a
"tea-and-toast" diet because they either do not possess the physical
energy or they no longer have the mental faculty to provide themselves
with a good nutrition.
The last group are those that have a high
metabolic rate but aren't athletes with lots of physical activity. The
best example of this are people whose bodies are fighting serious
illness, most commonly infection. The immune system needs lots of energy
so it is important to keep these patients well fed so that they can at
least maintain if not gain weight.