http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Alternatives-to-knee-replacement-for-older-5308302.php

I wasn't always overweight. My Mother has pictures of me at 22 and my gf says I look almost skeletal because I was so thin. Back then I burned it all off because I walked everywhere. Not because I couldn't afford the bus or anything but because I liked walking all over SF to see what's in a neighborhood or on a street. I've walked a great deal of the streets of San Francisco because as a teenager I delivered the SF Progress which took me all over the city to deliver it once I got out of the truck with the bi-weekly papers. That paper later went bankrupt due to union costs and its successor is now the Independent.

When I was 22 I weighed 220 and was going to weight watchers and was steadily losing weight. At 18 I weighed 180 which was commensurate for my height and weight. My Mother's doctor ( who was once mine ) has told me that if I ever do lose weight I should weigh no less than 200 lbs at present because it would not be good for my body to weigh less.

A lot of my weight issues are due to injuries or successive illnesses that have frequently left me bedridden or otherwise unable to go out and walk as told of below. Its NOT because I overeat.(  My online detractors only choose to focus on how I look now. They have no idea what I used to look like when I was healthy and uninjured. Nor how I used to walk or burn off the calories. ).

Right now most days I get on here or start doing videos, look up items to talk about or post news items and get so involved with it that I forget about eating and then I am ravenous between 2-5 am. I go hours on the computer without a break. I really should learn to take more breaks but I go so into doing these things that I forget about the rest of the world and eating, except for coffee, tea, hot chocolate or water. I do drink a lot of water every day, sometimes as much as 3 quarts in the summer as it gets unbearably hot in my apartment.

Its worse in the winter when its cold and windy here and when we used to get regular rain storms.  I don't do well in the cold as it affects both my knee and my sinuses. Yesterday I only had one thing to eat, some chili with two Foster Farms chicken franks and a lot of water. Once the Farmer's Markets open I will be eating healthier with more veggies and fruit.

I'm going to see a knee surgeon today as things are moving around inside my right kneecap and causing excruciating pain much of the time, so this is of definite interest to me. I fell on an escalator on BART 10 years ago & landed on the inspection plate of the escalator, gained a lot of weight because I had to walk on crutches for over a year, favored the left leg & now that knee is failing as well and the right one is continually filled with fluid and swollen with NO relief. I weighed 260 before that happened and used to walk 3 miles a day with NO problem. I liked walking and still do. I try to get out most days when I pry myself off the keyboard and walk about a mile each day.

.I was walking 3 miles a day last yearwhen it got warmer but had to stop because of the knee pain. I was losing weight before that accident because of all the walking I did. I still walk now but now every movement of my right knee hurts like hell.

In my youth I walked all over and have walked as much as 33 miles in one day out of neccessity. I once walked from Sunset Blvd in Hollywood to Santa Monica a distance of 33 miles. I got quite a fright when looming out of the fog ( it forms there late at night ) I saw a sabertooth tiger on top of a wooly mammoth at the La Brea Tar pits as I was walking up Wilshire Blvd. They're outside of a museum there & I'd never seen them before.

Later in that trip I was walking through Beverly Hills at 3 am and the Beverly Hills PD came up beside me as I was walking reading a book ( MFU # $4v : The Dagger Affair by David Mc Daniel ) and they asked me what I was doing.

Being all of 18 back then and being very matter of fact I answered :

" Reading my book. "

They then asked :

" No, WHAT are you doing here ? "

I still didn't quite understand why they were asking me stuff and said :

" I'm walking, reading my book. "

Then they asked me finally :

" What are YOU doing here ? "

To which I finally replied :

" Oh, I understand you. I was visiting Robert Bloch at his house ( sf & fantasy author and author of Psycho) and his wife gave me a ride to the bus stop but since I had just missed the last bus and she had driven away and the next bus wasn't for 8 hours and I had a map of LA, I decided to WALK to Santa Monica. "

They looked at my id and thought I was crazy. No one walks in Beverly Hills much less in the middle of the night. Few also walk long distances in LA either. Or at least they didn't do it back in 1970.

But I'd never been to LA at that time and it was fascinating. I got to see UCLA and everything between Hollywood and Santa Monica. But the problem with walking long distances in LA is that the freeways cut off streets and frequently I had to find a street that went under the freeway which mean long detours out of my way.

When I got to my friend's apartment in Santa Monica, I was spent and exhausted, banged on door ( it took me 8 hours of walking to go 33 miles ) and collapsed onto his sofa bed and slept for about 12 hours.

Or because I was exploring. When BART was being built ( our regional subway system ) my gf's father was a BART designer and engineer. He got me and my gf permission to go into BART and watch the construction of the tunnel under S.F. Bay. Just to see if I could do it, I walked the entire length of the original BART system during its construction, from Daly City to Concord, from the Emabarcadero to Richmond and from Oakland to Fremont. It was fascinating to watch and I wish I'd had a video camera or camera to film it all. I wasn't as much into the visual as I am today, my You Tube videos not withstanding. I was a terrible photographer.

When I was 14, I and the Robin, son of former California US Senator Alan Cranston bicycled from San Francisco to Los Angeles just to see if we could do it. Took us about a week. We had the same problem I had 4 years later. Its terrible to try to get around in LA or to approach it on a bicycle. Back then ( 1966 ) there were no such things as bicycle lanes or bike paths.

Robin later died in an auto accident and Alan never quite got over the loss. I knew him because my Mother knew the family and Robin and I had become friends. I missed him too.

I've been trying to get surgery for 10 years and finally got a doctor to refer me to a doctor who only does KNEE surgery. I  am having trouble standing, walking on it which is a big reason WHY I cannot lose weight. The other night I was in the kitchen standing up doing dishes and not moving the leg at all and suddenly there was a spike of pain in the right knee so bad that I screamed and almost passed out from it. Waves of pain thereafter for the rest of the night. I used to be able to ice it down to get some relief. Doesn't help anymore. Right knee is now swollen 3x the size of the left. I can also feel and hear things going " crunch " in the knee. Feels like I'm walking on broken glass or gravel.

This is the kind of doctor's they're " training " nowaadays.

I once had an idiotic doctor at the orthopedic surgery clinic at UCSF tell me that I was fat and had arthritis. He hadn't even looked at the cat scan of my knee or the xray. He also chewed out my gf because she stopped him to ask when I would be done since she'd been sitting waiting for me to finish being examined for 2 hours.

I already knew about the arthritis as it set in after a fall off of my bike in 1984 & my doctor then said it would eventually spread to every joint in my body since it was in my spine.

Doctors just LOVE to blame everything on being overweight but IF someone had operated on the knee when it was originally injured, I would not have gotten as overweight as I am.

I and others think that a lot of doctors do nothing about chronic pain because of budgetary limitations or because they're afraid of being sued.

Meanwhile patients like me get to suffer and get passed from doctor to doctor with no resolution to the problem.

When I got my first sinus infection, I had one doctor tell me he didn't believe I was sick at all until he saw my cat scan of my sinuses.

Had another one tell me that I was his last patient of the night and he didn't have  the TIME to LISTEN to my medical history.

I went into the administration office the next day and raised hell about it and said I wasn't leaving until I saw someone in charge and told them " your quacks are going to kill me. "

The doctor above finally referred me to UCSF where I got the treatment I needed. I almost died from the first infection with having only 20% of lung capacity and being taken to the hospital 5x in an ambulance because I couldn't get air into my lungs.

I now have copd, and asthma permanently because of that sinus infection that could have been killed off with 30 days ( 10 does nothing as has been prescribed for me in the past ) of antibiotics.

I am prone to sinus infections because I am allergic to grasses ( not the kind you smoke ) and when I get allergy attacks, I get colds or it turns into a sinus infection that lingers seemingly forever.

Allergy season every year makes things worse as well. Its hard to get away from grass. It's everywhere.