Frances Traphagan has been battling weightissues her whole life.
For years, the south Minneapolis mom struggled to balance work demands and motherhood. After every pregnancy, her weight problem grew. Her habit of eating on the run also tipped the scales in the wrong direction. Finally, at 240 pounds, the 5-foot-3 Traphagan chose to have bariatric surgery at the Hennepin Bariatric Cen- ter and Obesity Program at Hennepin County Medical_ Center in downtown Minneapolis.
It was my very last effort to try to lose weight,” she said.
She’d tried everything before that — from Weight Watchers to the Atkins diet to the grapefruit diet.
“I did have some success, but nothing was ever per-manent,” she said.
After a national report this summer shoved that women have surpassed men in obesity rates, doctors and obesity researchers are searching for answers to why women are struggling more than men.
For the first time, more than40 percent of U.S. women are obese, according to the latest numbers from the Cen-ters for Disease Control and Prevention.
The nation as a whole continues to struggle with obey sity, with 35percent of men considered obese. But while men’s obesity rates appear to have stabilized, women’s are still riging, the CDC report shows.
Dr. Maria Collazo-Clavell, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic who works with overweight and obese patients, has been working in the obesity research field for 20 years. She said the recent findings give her pause about whether public health officials are taking the right approach to tackling obesity.