Houston based neurologist and founder of the Houston Healthcare Initiative (www.houstohealthcareinitiative.org) Dr. Steven Goldstein talked about the risk of strokes and their relationship to weight and obesity on his weekly podcast. While the outcomes from strokes are always bad, Dr. Goldstein allowed that from a pure psychological point of view, losing weight was more difficult than recovering from a stroke. “Assuming the patient survives and has the ability to rehabilitate him or herself, there is a lot of motivation for them to do the things that will lead to recovery,” Dr. Goldstein told his audience.
Losing weight means changes in lifestyle, adding exercise, eliminating things that we all like to eat and drink in a process that takes a lot of sacrifice. So it is very hard to maintain this type of change over any amount of time. While motivation for losing weight is psychologically challenging, but on the whole it is better to lose weight than endure a stroke.