Bariatric Girl

It ALWAYS bothers me when I see the People Magazine issues that say “REAL” weight loss stories. Of course REAL means no surgery was involved. I wish I could see follow up stories on each one of these real women. I’m guessing that most of them have gained some or all of their weight back….only because it’s not hard to lose it…..it’s hard to keep it off. If People Magazine had caught me at the right time, I could have been one of those real women too. I’ve been a real woman weight loss person so many times that I have lost count. As a matter of fact, I’ve lost at least 1000 pounds….just not in the same year.

I did see one other story (buried and small) about life saving gastric bypass.

Here’s that link

Of course they had to add the bit about the woman that died. Interestingly enough when someone writes or blogs negatively about weight loss surgery, they don’t want to address the danger of being morbidly obese. As the surgery becomes safer they are digging hard for something else to complain about. Now it seems many are talking about WLS being so bad due to malabsorption. That means that you have to take extra vitamins so that you get enough nutrients.

Hmmmm….a choice.

Be obese? Take vitamins for the rest of my life?

I’ll sign up to take vitamins!

According to JAMA, obesity is the second leading cause of death.

JAMA article

In short it says this:

Main Outcome Measures
Actual causes of death.

Results
The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435 000 deaths; 18.1% of total US deaths), poor diet and physical inactivity (400 000 deaths; 16.6%), and alcohol consumption (85 000 deaths; 3.5%). Other actual causes of death were microbial agents (75 000), toxic agents (55 000), motor vehicle crashes (43 000), incidents involving firearms (29 000), sexual behaviors (20 000), and illicit use of drugs (17 000).

I’m thinking that if you’re armed…
a bad driver….
use drugs and alcohol….
smoke and eat too much….
your outlook isn’t good.

When you are morbidly obese there are so many things that can go wrong with your health. Do you know that chances of getting cancer are higher? There’s a technical explanation ……. easy enough to look up.

You’d think cancer would scare the hell out of an obese person but if you think that’s all it takes, you don’t know this disease very well. It’s a lot like someone telling an alcoholic to stop drinking for the sake of his children. Yeah…like that’s all it takes.

Will power right?

NOT!

Some day I’ll post all the stuff I did to lose weight. When I was filling out forms before surgery, I had to list all the diets I had tried. This is the truth….I did the equivalent of “google” at the time and I only had to delete a couple. A few of the diets weren’t even listed and one of the doctors I went to in Mississippi actually went to jail. I never tried any needles because of fear but the “wanting” was there. When I found out about the surgery I would have given up a toe or two if necessary. Sandals just weren’t that important.

Diets don’t work and I could go into a long explanation but I’ll save it for another day. Surgery won’t work if you don’t make some changes. You have to correct some things that caused you to become obese in the first place. In the future I wish People Magazine would do a cover on real women that lost weight (doesn’t matter how) and kept it off for…oh… five years let’s say.

I’d have a shot at that cover (and it’s been 7 years)….and it might look something like this.