Taking the "unexplained" out of the phrase "unexplained weight gain"
Bill O'Reilly was recently chastized by a letter-writer who chided him for being unsympathetic to overweight (weight-challenged?) Americans. The writer said that O'Reilly didn't understand the phenomenon of "unexplained weight gain", a phrase I'd never heard before. I always crudely thought that weight was the result of too many calories chasing too little activity.
The combination of our inactivity, the plentitude of bad food and our tendency to mask negative emotions with food makes weight gain in Americans not surprising at all. (Personally, my favored euphemism for being overweight is "big-boned").
That having been said, I understand that women have a more difficult time losing weight than men do (due to having a lower percentage of muscle, which decreases metabolism) and that metabolisms slow as we age, but I consider a tumor to be an unexplained weight gain rather than something we have at least some control over. From a practical viewpoint, the pains we have to go to be at a 'right weight' are for most people not worth the trouble it takes to stay there, IMHO.
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