What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting, which very fat people are pressured heavily to do. One Yale University study found that adult women (ages eighteen to forty-nine) who have used common, over-the-counter appetite suppressants faced a 1,558 percent increased risk for hemorrhagic stroke.27 Even in the absence of appetite suppressants, weight cycling—that is, a history of gaining and losing significant amounts of weight, sometimes referred to as yo-yo dieting—has been associated with an increased risk
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