Struggling with sex when you’re overweight

Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best-selling author, blogs about sex on Thursdays on The Chart. Read more from him on his website, GoodInBed.

On the CBS sitcom “Mike & Molly,” the title characters meet at an Overeaters Anonymous support group and embark on a romantic relationship.

It’s an uncommon look at intimacy between plus-sized partners, played mainly for laughs. But with obesity rates skyrocketing in this country, sex when one or both partners is heavy is becoming a very real issue.

Nearly 34% of American adults are obese, according to the CDC, and many more are overweight. It’s not surprising that people who are carrying extra pounds may find themselves grappling with the effects on their sex lives.

Being overweight or obese can put a damper on things in the bedroom, as my clients Tom and Laura discovered. Married for 12 years, they had always enjoyed a satisfying sex life – until Laura began to gain weight. At first Tom was understanding: He knew that Laura’s self-esteem had taken a hit and he didn’t want to add to that.

When they came to see me after many sexless months, however, Tom finally admitted that he was having trouble finding Laura as attractive as he once had.

Whether you’ve always been heavy or have just put on weight over the years, you may notice that your sex life is going downhill. A recent study of moderately to severely obese people, published in the “Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy,” found that these men and women reported being less satisfied than the general population.

Another study, by researchers at Duke University, found that up to 30% of obese people who sought help controlling their weight did so due to problems with their libido, sex drive, and/or sexual performance.

While self-esteem may play a role, it’s not the only factor involved. Conditions such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes often accompany obesity and can impair blood flow to the genitals, resulting in problems with erectile dysfunction in men and arousal in both men and women. Extra weight can also stress the knees and other joints, making some sexual positions uncomfortable.

Of course, not everyone who is overweight is in poor health or unfit. Some research even suggests that heavier people may enjoy a few extra benefits in the bedroom: A 2008 study in “Obstetrics & Gynecology” looked at more than 7,000 women and found that those who were overweight were actually slightly more likely to report having had sex with men than their slimmer counterparts.

Another study found men who are overweight are less likely to have premature ejaculation and tend to last longer in bed—7.3 minutes, compared to just 103 seconds for thinner men. This difference is possibly because heavy men typically have higher levels of the female sex hormone estradiol, which delays climax.

It’s absolutely possible to enjoy a satisfying sex life whether you weigh 130 pounds or 330 pounds. If you’re overweight and struggling to keep things steamy, though, it’s time to take action. That doesn’t have to mean going on a diet, although shedding just 10 pounds can stimulate sex hormones and improve health.

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Opinion: Why we should regulate sugar like alcohol

By Laura Schmidt, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Laura Schmidt and her colleagues, Robert Lustig and Claire Brindis, are the authors of “The toxic truth about sugar.” To read the full commentary, visit the science journal Nature.

(CNN) — I am a medical sociologist, which means I study the health of whole societies. I’ve spent more than 20 years studying the best possible ways to address alcohol problems in societies — what works and what doesn’t to protect people from harm.

I work as a professor in the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and at the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. This allows me to connect with other scientists who come from very different backgrounds but who want to work together on big problems — think of a Manhattan Project, only one focused on protecting health through the collaboration of scientists who study everything from tiny cells to entire societies.

So three years ago, a pediatric endocrinologist named Rob Lustig walks into my office and asks for my help. Rob tells me that he’s finding many connections between the metabolism of fructose (sugar) and ethanol (alcohol) in his work on metabolic functioning, liver damage and the obesity epidemic.

Rob runs the obesity clinic at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, where he spends his days trying to help morbidly obese kids who feel hungry all the time. One of the saddest effects of sugar overconsumption is to dampen the natural hormones that tell kids’ bodies when they’ve eaten enough, leading them to feel hungry even as they overeat.

Rob says he’s also seeing that too much sugar in these kids’ diets causes severe liver damage — they have even started doing liver transplants on some of the kids in his clinic.

Fast-forward to today, and here’s what we’ve learned:

– More people on the planet Earth are dying from chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes than anything else. This is even true for developing countries that have turned a critical page on health: People in those countries are now more likely to die from the “diseases of affluence” than from the “diseases of poverty” like malaria and cholera. Major risk factors in chronic disease, of course, are alcohol, tobacco and junk food consumption.

– Many of the health hazards of drinking too much alcohol, such as high blood pressure and fatty liver, are the same as those for eating too much sugar. When you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense. Alcohol, after all, is simply the distillation of sugar. Where does vodka come from? Sugar.

– We may be thinking about obesity and chronic disease in the wrong way. Most experts are worried about sugar because it’s “empty calories” that make people fat. But what leads to chronic disease is actually something called metabolic syndrome, which can be caused by the toxic effects of sugar.

– Added sugar at the levels consumed by many Americans changes our metabolism — it raises blood pressure, critically alters the signaling of hormones that turn hunger on and off, and can damage the pancreas and liver. Worldwide consumption of sugar has tripled over the past 50 years, and along with that has come an obesity pandemic. But obesity may just be a marker for the damage caused by the toxic effects of too much sugar. This would help explain why up to 40% of people with the metabolic syndrome — what leads to diabetes, heart disease and cancer — are not clinically obese.

What should we do about all this?

Click here to read more.

By Stephanie Siek, CNN

(CNN) – Salt Lake City, Utah, is known for breathtaking mountain scenery, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the 2002 Winter Olympics.

But today it was also named the Gayest City in America by The Advocate magazine.

The Advocate ranked cities according to its own admittedly nonscientific criteria, including the number of gay and lesbian bookstores, elected officials who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and some edgier metrics like the number of International Mr. Leather competition semifinalists and the presence of nude yoga classes. This year’s list intended to examine cities that are outside the usual orbit of San Francisco, Boston, Miami and New York, and came up with several surprises – Grand Rapids, Michigan, Knoxville, Tennessee. Even Little Rock, Arkansas, ranked 11 out of 15.

Salt Lake City LGBTQ advocates were pleasantly surprised by the rankings.

“Well, you know, we’re all very proud of our community here, and we’ve done a lot of growing and empowering of each other and our allies in the community,” said Valerie Larabee, the executive director of the Utah Pride Center, but “we probably wouldn’t have a higher ranking if the homework was done … We don’t have naked yoga, or at least none of us know about it.”

(For the record: The Advocate counted one nude yoga class there, and one Mr. Leather semifinalist, too.)

According to 2010 Census data analyzed by UCLA’s Williams Institute, 15.36 out of every 1,000 households in Salt Lake City are headed by a same-sex couple. Salt Lake City ranks 81^st out of 1,415 cities nationwide in its number of same-sex couples per capita.

The same analysis found that Little Rock had 7.51 gay or lesbian couples for every 1,000 households, ranking it 392^nd.

Salt Lake City was ranked higher than several cities many would presume to be gay-friendlier, like Denver, Austin, and Atlanta. But Larabee said that Salt Lake’s top ranking shouldn’t overshadow the discrimination and lack of acceptance that many LGBTQ Utahns still face.

“I appreciate that there’s some humor in the selections, in the indices that were used, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves,” Larabee said. “We, like many of these communities, still have some issues that need to be addressed. While we have a thriving community here, we’re united because we have to be.”

Opinion: Attention Rick Santorum – here’s how to support a gay child

Randi Romo heads the Center for Artistic Revolution in Little Rock, which serves as the state’s LGBTQ organization. She was also bemused by the city’s inclusion.

To see the entire list and read more, click here.

From Chris Lawrence, CNN Pentagon Correspondent

(CNN) — The Pentagon is set to certify that the U.S. military is prepared to accept openly gay and lesbian service members, and doing so will not harm military readiness, a U.S. official told CNN on Thursday.

According to the official, who spoke on condition of not being identified, an announcement of that certification — which is required to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — is likely to come Friday.

Under a bill passed last year that set up a process for repealing the controversial policy, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, along with President Barack Obama, have to sign a certification that confirms the military’s ability to accept the integration of openly gay and lesbian troops.

Even after certification, there will be a 60-day waiting period before the repeal is fully implemented.

In a statement Thursday, one of the leading groups advocating for repeal, Servicemembers United, said it had expected Panetta to act on certification after assessing the situation since he succeeded Robert Gates as defense secretary on July 1.

“We are glad to see that just three weeks into his tenure as secretary of defense, he (Panetta) is already confident that this policy change can take place with little or no disruption to military readiness,” said the Servicemembers United statement.

Repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy would end a convoluted legal battle led by human rights and gay rights groups.

A gay rights group — the Log Cabin Republicans — had sued over the 18-year-old ban on openly gay and lesbian members serving in the U.S. armed forces.

In September U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips declared the military’s ban to be unconstitutional and demanded the government immediately stop enforcing it.

U.S. officials have been moving ahead with dismantling “don’t’ ask, don’t tell” but had objected to having the courts force the government to officially repeal it.

The case put the Obama administration in an unusual position of supporting a repeal but at the same time filing court motions to prevent it from happening faster than planned.

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