I’ve had knee problems since age 12 and three years ago at age 50 it had progressed to degeneration of the cartilage under the kneecap and inflammation that has now gotten inside the bone of the kneecap. My knee doctor then (3 yrs ago) told me I would “almost definitely” need total knee replacements of both knees “in a few years.” That freaked me out and I got serious about weight loss then (oddly the doc didn’t even mention my weight as an issue, but the PT did; I was quite overweight and closing in on obese). I couldn’t even walk up stairs anymore without these sharp stabs of pain on every step, like my knee was being stabbed with an ice pick with every step up, and could not rise up easily out of a chair.
It’s three years later. I have lost 52 lbs and am holding steady at a BMI of just under 20. (I picked a target weight 10 lbs above the underweight boundary, the idea being to minimize weight on my knees as much as possible, while still having a safe buffer from the underweight zone). My knees have gotten so much better - I can do stairs now no problem. In fact I just realized today that I’d actually forgotten that stairs used to be painful. I can get down/up out of chairs with reasonable control.
But weight loss didn’t solve everything. I was still having a lot of persistent aching, and a recent MRI showed that the kneecap cartilage is still all hashed up. I realized then that you can’t undo 40 years of damage to cartilage no matter how much weight you lose. So I was feeling a little discouraged. I went to a new knee doc today, a specialist who I hadn’t seen before, & he was looking through the MRI and was laying out all the options for me - cortisone shots and gel shots and more PT and so forth - and finally I just had to ask, “By the way, I lost 50 pounds hoping that would help. I was just wondering, was that really worth doing?”
He stopped dead in his spiel and kind of spun and looked at me, and I explained “I used to be 190 pounds and now I’m 138.” He got this expression, like, laser-beams-of-intensity coming out of his eyes, and said, “That is the very best thing you could have done for your knees. Better than every other treatment option I’ve outlined.” Then he explained, “In any weight-bearing position with your knee bent [like going up or down stairs, getting up out of a chair] each 1 pound of body mass translates to 7 pounds of force on the inner surface of the patella, so what you have done is remove 350 pounds of force from the damaged surface of the kneecap, every single time you do that sort of motion.”
He went on to say that he thinks my knees are actually in pretty good shape! They’re still inflamed but not too badly. There’s a bit of arthritis but not too much. Basically he thinks I have halted the progression of the damage! I still will need other treatments (PT, 1 cortisone shot, maybe a gel injection) but he thinks I will not need knee replacement surgery after all. (not that that would be the end of the world, but it was nice to hear that I just might not even need it!) He said “stay at 138 pounds, keep doing what you’re doing to maintain that weight, do your PT religiously and we’ll give you 1 cortisone shot” and with all those things together, there is a very good chance I’ll have usable and 100% pain-free knees for years. He even approved long hikes and bike riding and even some very light jogging.
So though losing weight didn’t magically cure all of the damage, it turns out it has really helped halt the decline, and is a key piece of the treatment plan.
I was just so happy to hear that it was all worthwhile! I mean, I kind of knew it must have helped, but it was so rewarding to have it verified.
edit to add: CICO all the way. Minimal sugar/booze, boosted protein & high fiber veggies, made myself give up all forms of salty chips (my biggest binge trigger), and I don’t drink any calories. Used an Ozeri food scale, My Fitness Pal & my trusty fitbit HR, and a lot of Pokemon Go to keep me walking. I weighed everything for a couple months. During maintenance I have found I no longer need to weigh & track everything because I now have a better intuitive sense of portion size, but I never went back to my old favorite foods. I still weigh myself every day and track occasionally just to be sure I’m on track. My rule is that I have stay within 2 lbs of target weight; if I drift outside that I go back to full tracking till I am back at target. (Oh and I ended up becoming the first Mystic player in town to hit level 40 in Pokemon Go, lol)
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