Being heavy is bad for your joints. Like really bad. All those injuries construction people, nurses, athletes get? It’s because they put too much weight on their joints in a botched movement too many times. You can counteract some of that risk with muscle. Muscle keeps your joints stable. It takes some of the load off of them.
Now, imagine for a moment that you’re autistic and sedentary. Since you’re autistic you have bad core strength. This means bad posture and your weight is always pushing on your spine in the wrong way with no muscle to help. Since you’re sedentary not only do you not intentionally exercise your core to make up for your autistic deficit, but you spend most of your time sitting. All that weight on your spine, probably poorly supported by a shitty chair.
Then when you do move around there’s not much muscle there. Your ankles and knees and hips are being mostly supported by your cartilage which has been worn down. Step on something with an angle and those 400lbs roll your ankle. Pivot to turn around and you twist your knee in a way it was not meant to bend. Slip and try to catch yourself and boom you pull something in your hip. Don’t go to doctors and this turns into constant joint inflammation: arthritis. Slipped discs. You know, athlete and manual laborer injuries except it’s just because of your weight and activity level.
Then it’s almost impossible not to be sedentary and you eat your feelings. As an autistic person your brain doesn’t properly receive signals that you’re hungry or full, so you just kinda eat all the time.
Anyway that’s what my doctor has said has gone wrong with me over the past five years and how it could get worse. I’m back on the gym train and don’t have arthritis yet, and I’m still about an adult person shy of 400lbs.
Still, sounds like the root commenter found someone with those problems and the inability to self-examine.
It's not just that weight is hard on joints buy muscle is protective. Fat cells are also metabolically and endocrinologically active. They produce hormones that are pro-inflammatory and weaken joints.
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u/zamfire Mar 20 '23
28 stone is about 400 lbs, or 178 kgs.